Page:The Sacred Tree (Waley 1926).pdf/124

118 at Suma between three and four o’clock in the afternoon. It was indeed a trifling journey, but to Genji, who had never crossed the sea before, the experience was somewhat alarming, though his fears were mingled with wonder and delight. As they came in sight of that wild and lonely headland where stands the Hall of Ōye marked by its solitary pine, he recited the verse: ‘A life more outcast shall be mine among these hills than all those exiles led whose sufferings the books of Kara have rehearsed.’ He watched the waves lapping up over the sands and then creeping back again. It put him in mind of the ancient song: ‘Oh would that like the tides I went but to return!’ Those who were with him knew the song well enough, but never before had it moved them as now when Genji murmured to himself the long-familiar words. Looking back he saw that the mountains behind them were already melting into the hazy distance, and it seemed to him that he had indeed travelled the classical ‘three thousand leagues’ of which the Chinese poets so often speak. The monotonous dripping of the oars now became almost unendurable. ‘Now is my home hid from me by the mist-clad hills, and even the sky above me seems not the lovely cloudland that I knew.’ So he sang, being for the moment utterly downcast and dispirited.

His new home was quite close to the place where in ancient days Ariwara no Yukihira once lived in exile, ‘trailing his water-buckets along the lonely shore.’ At this