It is light; light like the thinnest edge of a sword set in the far distance. But the crack broadens, widens, rounds, and grows by imperceptible degrees into an open archway, showing the bright water and the green hills beyond. And swiftly we rush towards the light, while the little picture no bigger than the reflection on a camera grows curves and outlines, swells here, retreats there, and passes from a flat reflection into a rounded reality. The tunnel itself is no longer black. The walls, the rounded roof, lie like shadows, deep brown, growing quickly greyer. And above, on either side, the bats are clinging thickly, in long rows. We shoot into the light and see that walls and boat are covered with a fluttering half-dead mass of ghost-grey moths. They coat the tunnel from wall to roof, they lie in struggling heaps on boat and carpet, our clothes are full of them. With one last swift glide we are out of the grey shadow, out under the blue sky. The green hills rise on either side, the water dimples in the sun. Slowly the grey moths flutter back to the darkness. For through the heart of the mountain Lake Biwa has come to Kyoto. IX THE INLAND SEA The little steamer lay tilted up against the end of the pier, for all the waters of the ocean were rushing madly through the Straits of Shimonoseki into the Inland Sea. The waters lay encircled as a lake, for the space between the inner and the outer strait is narrow, but they ran swift as a mountain river. The square-sailed junks, all sails set, were racing down the stream in the very eye of the wind, while those coming up with a strong breeze behind them hardly seemed to stir. And the little steamer at the end of the pier tilted herself up higher and higher. She was a foreign-built boat, though only about the size of a launch, but she looked like a Moorish house afloat, for all the boat was cabin, and all the deck was roof, whitewashed, ribbed roof, with a striped awning. As we left the pier and struck the full force of the current, the striped awning and the uneven deck dipped down and down until the Moorish roof turned Gothic. We were in the full force of the current now, and tearing down the stream with, as somebody said, “all our engines going the wrong way.” Up the side of the boat the water climbed, pulling it down with long strong hands, until the flat deck was turned to a gable roof. For five breathless minutes we balanced between air and water, and then we were through the inner strait which turns the waters of the Inland Sea between Moji and Shimonoseki into one big lake, and the coast of the South Island began to fall away. The tide was running less swiftly now, the ridge of our gable roof sank slowly into the water, and the little steamer floated a white, flat-roofed, Moorish house once more. “There is nothing,” said the steward, “for the _Ijin San_ to eat.”