Our unnautical captain, who, ever since we had entered the rushes, had been intoning directions to the invisible crew as though he were reading poetry aloud, got up out of his hole. The _tink, tink_, of the metal pipes on the wooden deck died gradually away as each smoker knocked out his last wad of tobacco and put away his pipe. Then with a sudden and terrific snort the absurd little steamer, an end in either bank, stood still. The big-headed boy, hanging over the side of the boat, kicked violently with his heels, while the unexpected apparition of the crew’s head rose up at our feet. The head took a look round and sank again, and the engines rattled. Still with an end in either bank, and with the big-headed boy clasping the gunwale in his arms, we proceeded to turn slowly round, and then, assisted by several ropes and several haulers, to back majestically into the main street of Shobara. Our journey was ended. The big-headed boy, leaving the gunwale, rushed to reshoe the first-class passengers as they wriggled from the saloon on to the roadway. The bullet-headed peasants and their little brown wives bowing low bows to each other, the captain and to the _Ijin San_, took up their bundles and trudged off, while we, like a Royal arrival, were received by the authorities of Shobara, in the person of a fierce little policeman in a new white suit, and duly escorted the three-and-a-half paces from the ship’s side to the tea-house door in a procession, the people lining up the way. And the last we saw of that absurd little steamer, as we turned into the tea-house, was a glimpse of the crew looking down the funnel, while the big-headed boy, standing amidships, handed out the cargo to its owners on either bank. II TO KIZUKI The green earth lay burning in the sun, wrapt round and round with heat. Between the tall blue lines of hills it stretched, the flat green floor of a deep blue cavern, whose roof-top was the sky. And through the green the long white road ran out of sight. The only living thing that moved was the running _kurumaya_, all else lay sleeping in the bright night-time of heat, a heavy drugged sleep that neither rested nor refreshed. Inert the green earth stretched between the blue hills, weighed down with heat; a palpable heat through which we moved as a fish moves through water; a visible heat which was lying there heavy on the land, floating round the blue hills, quivering against the white sky, humming in the still air, rolling in great drops down the bronzed back of the _kurumaya_, drowsing me to sleep as with the soft waving of a heated fan, a heavy, encompassing heat that stunned. And always the white road ran on through the green earth, and the long, straight lines of hills on either side shut off the sky.