Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/19

 of imprisonment. The steamer's course from San Francisco to Yokohama varies from 4500 to 4800 miles, and the journey takes from twelve to sixteen days. From Vancouver to Yokohama it is seventy hours shorter.

When the ship's course turns perceptibly southward the mild weather of the Japan Stream is felt. In winter the first sign of land is a distant silver dot on the horizon, which in summer turns to blue or violet, and gradually enlarges into the tapering cone of Fuji, sloping upward in faultless lines from the water’s edge. One may approach land many times and never see Fuji, and during my first six months in Japan the matchless mountain refused to show herself from any point of view. Cape King, terminating the long peninsula that shelters Yeddo Bay, shows first a line of purple cliffs, and then a front of terraced hills, green with rice and wheat, or golden with grain or stubble. Fleets of square-sailed fishing-boats drift by, their crews, in the loose. Flapping gowns and universal blue cotton head towels of the Japanese coolies, easily working the broad oar at the stern. At night Cape King's welcome beacon is succeeded by Kanonsaki’s lantern across the Bay, Sagami’s bright light, then the myriad flashes of the Yokosuka navy-yard, and last the red ball of the light-ship, marking the edge of the shoal a mile outside the Bund, or sea-wall, of Yokohama. When this craft runs up its signal-flag a United States man-of-war, if there be one in port, fires two guns, as a signal that the American mail has arrived.

Daylight reveals a succession of terraced hills, cleft by narrow green valleys and narrower ravines; little villages, their clusters of thatched roofs shaded by pine, palm, or bamboo; fishing-boats always in the foreground, and sometimes Fuji clear-cut against the sky, its base lost now and then behind the overlapping hills. In summer Fuji’s purple cone shows only ribbon stripes of white near its apex. For the rest of the year it is a 3