Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/182

 platform that constitutes the floor of the one room, and bring the tray with its tiny tea-pot, thimble cups, and dish of barley-sugar candies. For the refreshment one leaves a few coppers on the tray, and in mountain jaunts, where the traveller walks to escape the kago and spare the coolies, these tiny cups of pale yellow tea are very stimulating. Each tateba commands some particular view, and even the pilgrim who is tramping the provinces and living on a few cents a day, will be found inditing poems to the different water-falls and gorges he looks down upon.

The head of the pass affords a magnificent view of the valley two thousand feet below, and presently the woodland path is following the border of the lake and comes out into the open of Chiuzenji village. Chiuzenji Lake, three miles wide and eight miles long, is surrounded by steep and thickly-wooded mountains, the great Nantaisan grandly soaring nine thousand feet above the sea, tapering regularly as a pyramid and forested to the summit. Nantaisan is a sacred mountain, a temple at its foot, shrines all along the ascent, and at the top an altar on which repentant murderers offer up their swords. Each August come hosts of pilgrims in white clothes and huge straw hats, with pieces of straw matting for rain-coats bound across their shoulders—devout souls, who, after purification in the lake, pass under the torii, say a prayer in the temple, and painfully climb to the summit. Only at such fixed seasons may visitors ascend the mountain, each one paying twenty cents for the privilege of toiling up its endless flight of steps. With these fees the priests keep the underbrush trimmed and the path well cleared, and where the holy guardian unbars the gate and motions one upward, begins the flight of stone stairs that extend, with few breaks or zigzags, straight to the top. The whole way is strewn with the cast-off sandals of the season, and great heaps of the waraji of past years lie here and there. 166