the far mountain ranges and to Fuji San, and at the dashing river, like a stream of molten silver flowing at our feet, when an eminent Japanese statesman, who spoke English fluently, said, pointing to a mountain north of us, "That mountain you see about forty miles from this spot was eleven hundred years ago an active volcano ! Its name is Bon Di San.' For all these centuries since then it has been silent. It is about 6,000 feet high." While he was talking to us we noticed that the sea-birds and the land-birds and the storks (their national bird, as the American eagle to us) were flying over our heads, screaming, it seemed, as if in fear and terror. We noticed that the few dogs with us were on their haunches, howling mournfully. We asked our Japanese servant, "What does all this mean?" His quiet and careless reply in broken or "pigeon" English was, "Earthquake coming! The bird and the dog, he know first before 'Mellican man' or Japanese man, when earthquake is acoming." Before we had time to reply to what we supposed was the craze of a crank, the trembling mountains and the swaying summits of other peaks around us and the sickening nausea produced by the drunken-motions, so to speak, of the mountains, told the story too truly that the "Jap" knew what was coming! The theory is that the finer and more delicate and sensitive nerves of the beast and bird feel the first and faint vibrations of the earth and the air and sea long before the duller nerves of man. In the midst of this trembling we looked to the mountain, which we had been told was once an active volcano. It had been blown up from its base into the heavens, scattering its ashes and debris far inland and on the sea, and falling back its rocks and earth had covered forever from the eyes of man a village at its base-a summer resort for bathing. It was literally Herculaneum and Pompeii reinacted; that fallen debris of the mountain was the monument and mausoleum of the dead, to rescue whose remains no pick or spade or mortal agency was ever invoked, nor will be till the judgment-day. These incidents may not be attractive to our countrymen as they were not to us, yet as we recall them now, after nearly a decade, we shudder with mortal dread at the memory of their mystic and awful power, coming "like a thief in the night," to awaken only to destroy. Earthquakes and Asiatic cholera are the only dark spots on the otherwise fair picture of physical Japan. They, however, do not frighten, much less appall, the Japanese. His supreme belief in eternal rest in "Nirvana " after death in the great hereafter, is the faith that supports him in peace or war, in life or death, hopeful and happy and absolutely without fear in the dissolution of life. |