The Days of a Man 1:1900 



./ Farther up we emerged on the "moor of the red 



flmvcry gedges " ^ — locally known as "battle meadow," 

 ^^''"^ though no battle was ever fought there ~ a breezy, 

 open, flower-strewn plain walled in by green moun- 

 tains of the same type as Nantai-san, which, being 

 nearest and highest, overtops the rest. Azaleas, 

 lilies, and iris were all out of bloom, but a purple and 

 yellow columbine, loosestrife, grass of Parnassus, and 

 wild sweet pea abounded. The many ferns were even 

 more like ours, especially the maidenhair: at the 

 "Komeya" they thought it a great joke when I 

 called this musumenoke, "hair of a girl." 



By the head of the moor amid the tall red grasses, 

 the river drops suddenly from a higher level in the 

 pretty Yu-no-taki, Hot Falls, 200 feet high, slipping 

 with hardly a break down a lava incline. Above, our 

 path wound through a flowery, briery thicket to the 

 Yumoto dainty lake of Yumoto, Hot Water Ground, a small 

 audits replica of Chuzenji, just as blue and walled in by the 

 surround- ^^^^ ^^^^ ^^ wooded hcights. Indeed, at first there 

 seems no room for lake, so closely do the mountains 

 hug the little valley. One of these, the volcano 

 Shirane-san, still erupts at intervals, not having yet 

 reached its majority. The slopes of its broken crater 

 are bare and red, and its uncooled lavas apparently 

 furnish heat for the many hot sulphur springs at the 

 head of the lake. To Yumoto village, composed of 

 primitive hotels and bathhouses, unconventional 

 country folk resort during "the season." 



Next day we turned back to Nikko with its mar- 

 velous temples devoted to the deified spirits of the 

 two great Tokugawa shoguns, lyeyasu and lyemitsu, 



' Really red rice grass, not a sedge. 



n 70 :i 



ings 



