Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/218

. The Tokaido railroad crosses the lake on a high embankment, which was sodded and covered with a lattice-work of straw bundles, while seed was sown in the crevices more than a year before the road could be used. The whole railroad, as we saw in passing its completed sections, is solidly built with stone foundations and stone ballast, and intended to last for centuries. The Japanese seldom hurry the making of public works, and even a railroad does not inspire them with any feverish activity. Not until the last detail and station-house was finished was the line opened for travel, and following so nearly the route of the old Tokaido, through the most fertile and picturesque part of Central Japan, it keeps always in sight Fujiyama or the ocean.

In the course of the afternoon plantations of mulberry-trees came in sight. Loads of mulberry branches and twigs were being hauled into the villages and sold by weight, the rearers of silk-worms buying the leaves and paper-makers the stems for the sake of the inside bark. Climbing to one high plateau, we rested at a little rustic shed of a tea-house, commanding a superb view down a great ragged ravine to the line of foam breaking at its bowlder strewn entrance, and so on to the limitless ocean. One of the jinrikisha coolies preceded us to the benches on the overhanging balcony, and, kindly pointing out the special beauties of the scene, took off his garments and spread them out on the rail in the matter-of-fact, unconscious way of true Japanese innocence and simplicity of mind.

The guide-book calls the stretch of country beyond that high-perched tea-house “a waste region,” but nothing could be more beautiful than the long ride through pine forest and belts of scrub-pine on that uncultivated plateau, always overlooking the ocean. At one point a temple to the goddess Kwannon is niched among towering rocks at the base of a narrow cliff, on whose 202