Through valleys most of this long route lies, valleys always open to
higher valleys, while the road ascends, valleys between mountains with
rice-fields ascending their slopes by successions of diked terraces
which look like enormous green flights of steps. Above them are
shadowing sombre forests of cedar and pine; and above these wooded
summits loom indigo shapes of farther hills overtopped by peaked
silhouettes of vapoury grey. The air is lukewarm and windless; and
distances are gauzed by delicate mists; and in this tenderest of blue
skies, this Japanese sky which always seems to me loftier than any other
sky which I ever saw, there are only, day after day, some few filmy,
spectral, diaphanous white wandering things: like ghosts of clouds,
riding on the wind.

But sometimes, as the road ascends, the rice-.fields disappear a while:
fields of barley and of indigo, and of rye and of cotton, fringe the
route for a little space; and then it plunges into forest shadows. Above
all else, the forests of cedar sometimes bordering the way are
astonishments; never outside of the tropics did I see any growths
comparable for density and perpendicularity with these. Every trunk is
straight and bare as a pillar: the whole front presents the spectacle of
an immeasurable massing of pallid columns towering up into a cloud of
sombre foliage so dense that one can distinguish nothing overhead but
branchings lost in shadow. And the profundities beyond the rare gaps in
the palisade of blanched trunks are night-black, as in Dore's pictures
of fir woods.

No more great towns; only thatched villages nestling in the folds of the
hills, each with its Buddhist temple, lifting a tilted roof of blue-grey
tiles above the congregation of thatched homesteads, and its miya, or