conveyance in a pour.

The rain shut out the distance, and the hood and oil-paper apron
eclipsed the foreground. The loss was not great, to judge by what
specimens of the view I caught at intervals. The landscape was a
geometric pattern in paddyfields. These, as yet unplanted, were
swimming in water, out of which stuck the stumps of last year's crop.
It was a tearful sight. Fortunately the road soon rose superior to
it, passed through a cutting, and came out unexpectedly above the
sea,--a most homesick sea, veiled in rain-mist, itself a
disheartening drab. The cutting which ushered us somewhat proudly
upon this inhospitable outlook proved to be the beginning of a pass
sixty miles long, between the Hida-Shinshiu mountains and the sea of
Japan.

I was now to be rewarded for my venture in an unlooked-for way; for I
found myself introduced here to a stretch of coast worth going many
miles to see.

The provinces of Hida and Etchiu are cut off from the rest of Japan
by sets of mountain ranges, impassable throughout almost their whole
length. So bent on barring the way are the chains that, not content
with doing so in mid-course, they all but shut it at their ocean end;
for they fall in all their entirety plumb into the sea. Following
one another for a distance of sixty miles, range after range takes
thus its header into the deep. The only level spots are the deltas
deposited by the streams between the parallels of peak. But these
are far between. Most of the way the road belts the cliffs, now near
their base, now cut into the precipice hundreds of feet above the
tide. The road is one continuous observation point. Along it our