Concerning a Hot-Water Tap, and Some General Conversation
Always speak to the stranger. If he doesn’t shoot, the chances are he’ll answer you.— Wertern Proverb.
IT is a far cry from Myanoshita to Michni and Mandalay. That is why we have met men from both those stations, and have spent a cheerful time talking about dacoits and the Black Mountain Expedition. One of the advantages of foreign travel is that one takes such a keen interest in, and hears so much about, Home. Truly, they change their trains, but not their train of thought, who run across the sea.
‘This is a most extraordinary place,’ said the Professor, red as a boiled lobster. ‘You sit in your bath and turn on the hot or cold spring, as you choose, and the temperature is phenomenal. Let’s go and see where it all comes from, and then let’s go away.’
There is a place called the Burning Mountain five miles in the hills. There went we, through unbroken loveliness of bamboo-copse, pine wood, grass downs, and pine wood again, while the river growled below. In the end we found an impoverished and second-hand Hell, set out orderly on the side of a raw and bleeding hillside. It looked as though a match-factory had been whelmed by a landslip. Water, in which bad eggs had been boiled, stood in blister-Tipped pools, and puffs of thin white smoke went up from the labouring under-earth. Despite the smell and the sulphur incrustations on the black rocks, I was disappointed, till I felt the heat of the ground, which was the heat of a boiler-sheathing. They call the mountain extinct. If untold tons of power, cased in a few feet of dirt, be the Japanese notion of extinction, glad I am that I have not been introduced to a lively volcano. Indeed, it was not an overweening notion of my own importance, but a tender regard for the fire-crust below, and a dread of starting the machinery by accident, that made me step so delicately, and urge return upon the Professor.
‘Huh! It’s only the boiler of your morning bath. All the sources of the springs are here,’ said he.
‘I don’t care. Let ’em alone. Did you never hear of a boiler bursting? Don’t prod about with your stick in that amateur way. You’ll turn on the tap.’
When you have seen a burning mountain you begin to appreciate Japanese architecture. It is not solid. Every one is burned out once or twice casually. A business isn’t respectable until it has received its baptism of fire. But fire is of no importance. The one thing that inconveniences a Jap is an earthquake. Consequently, he arranges his house that it shall fall lightly as a bundle of broom upon his head. Still further safeguarding himself, he has no foundations, but the cornerposts rest on the crowns of round stones sunk in the earth. The corner-posts take the wave of the shock, and, though the building may give way like an eel-trap, nothing very serious happens. This is what epicures of earthquakes aver. I wait for mine own experiences, but not near a suspected district such as the Burning Mountain.
It was only to escape from one terror to another that I fled Myanoshita. A blue-breeched dwarf thrust me into a dwarf ’rickshaw on spidery wheels, and down the rough road that we had taken four hours to climb ran me clamorously in half an hour. Take all the parapets off the Simla Road and leave it alone for ten years. Then run down the steepest four miles of any section,— not steeper than the drop to the old Gaiety Theatre,— behind one man!
‘We couldn’t get six Hill-men to take us in this style,’ shouted the Professor as he spun by, his wheels kicking like a duck’s foot, and the whole contraption at an angle of thirty. I am proud to think that not even sixty Hill-men would have gambolled with a sahib in that disgraceful manner. Nor would any tramway company in the Real East have run its cars to catch a train that used to start last year, but now — rest its soul — is as dead as Queen Anne. This thing a queer little seven-mile tramway accomplished with much dignity. It owned a first-class car and a second-class car,— two horses to each,— and it ran them with a hundred yards headway — the one all but empty, and the other half full. When the very small driver could not control his horses, which happened on the average once every two minutes, he did not waste time by pulling them in. He screwed down the brake and laughed — possibly at the company who had paid for the very elaborate car. Yet he was an artistic driver. He wore no Philistine brass badge. Between the shoulders of his blue jerkin were done in white, three rail-heads in a circle, and on the skirts as many tram-wheels conventionalised. Only the Japanese know how to conventionalise a tram-wheel or make a keypattern of rail-heads. Though we took twelve hours to cover the thirty miles that separated us from Yokohama, we admitted this much while we waited for our train in a village by the sea. A village of any size is about three miles long in the main street. Villages with a population of more than ten thousand souls take rank as towns.
‘And yet,’ said a man at Yokohama that night, you have not seen the densest population. That’s away in the western kens-districts, as you call them. The folk are really crowded thereabouts, but, virtually, poverty does not exist in the country. You see, an agricultural labourer can maintain himself and his family, as far as rice goes, for four cents a day, and the price of fish is nominal. Rice now costs a hundred pounds to the dollar. What do you make it by Indian standards? From twenty to twenty-five seers the rupee. Yes, that’s about it. Well, he gets, perhaps, three dollars and a-half a month. The people spend a good deal in pleasuring. They must enjoy themselves. I don’t think they save much. How do they invest their savings? In jewellery? No, not exactly; though you’ll find that the women’s hair-pins, which are about the only jewellery they wear, cost a good deal. Seven and eight dollars are paid for a good hair-pin, and, of course, jade may cost anything. What the women really lock their money up in is in their obis — the things you call sashes. An obi is ten or twelve yards long, and I’ve known them sold wholesale for fifty dollars each. Every woman above the poorest class has at least one good dress of silk and an obi. Yes, all their savings go in dress, and a handsome dress is always worth having. The western kens are the richest taken all round. A skilled mechanic there gets a dollar or dollar and a half a day, and, as you know, lacquer-workers and inlayers — artists — get two. There’s enough money in Japan for all current expenses. They won’t borrow any for railroads. They raise it ’emselves. Most progressive people the Japanese are as regards railways. They make them very cheaply; much more cheaply than any European lines. I’ve some experience, and I take it that two thousand pounds a mile is the average cost of construction. Not on the Tokaido, of course — the line that you came up by. That’s a Government line, State built, and a very expensive one. I’m speaking of the Japanese Railway Company with a mileage of three hundred, and the line from Kobé south, and the Kinshin line in the Southern island. There are lots of little companies with a few score miles of line, but all the companies are extending. The reason why the construction is so cheap is the nature of the land. There’s no long haulage of rails, because you can nearly always find a creek running far up into the country, and dump out your rails within a few miles of the place where they are wanted. Then, again, all your timber lies to your hand, and your staff are Japs. There are a few European engineers, but they are quite the heads of the departments, and I believe if they were cleared out to-morrow, the Japs would go on building their lines. They know how to make ’em pay. One line started on a State guarantee of eight per cent. It hasn’t called for the guarantee yet. It’s making twelve per cent on its own hook. There’s a very heavy freight-traffic in wood and provisions for the big towns, and there’s a local traffic that you can have no idea of unless you’ve watched it. The people seem to move in twenty-mile circles for business or pleasure —’specially pleasure. Oh, I tell you, Japan will be a gridiron of railways before long. In another month or two you’ll be able to travel nearly seven hundred miles on and by the To............