place," said the Professor, red as a
boiled lobster. "You sit in your bath and turn on the hot or cold
spring, as you choose, and the temperature is phenomenal. Let's go and
see where it all comes from, and then let's go away."

There is a place called the Burning Mountain five miles in the hills.
There went we, through unbroken loveliness of bamboo-copse, pine wood,
grass downs, and pine wood again, while the river growled below. In the
end we found an impoverished and second-hand Hell, set out orderly on
the side of a raw and bleeding hillside. It looked as though a
match-factory had been whelmed by a landslip. Water, in which bad eggs
had been boiled, stood in blister-lipped pools, and puffs of thin white
smoke went up from the labouring under-earth. Despite the smell and the
sulphur incrustations on the black rocks, I was disappointed, till I
felt the heat of the ground, which was the heat of a boiler-sheathing.
They call the mountain extinct. If untold tons of power, cased in a few
feet of dirt, be the Japanese notion of extinction, glad I am that I
have not been introduced to a lively volcano. Indeed, it was not an
overweening notion of my own importance, but a tender regard for the
fire-crust below, and a dread of starting the machinery by accident,
that made me step so delicately, and urge return upon the Professor.

"Huh! It's only the boiler of your morning bath. All the sources of the
springs are here," said he.

"I don't care. Let 'em alone. Did you never hear of a boiler bursting?
Don't prod about with your stick in that amateur way. You'll turn on the
tap."

When you have seen a burning mountain you begin to appreciate Japanese
architecture. It is not solid. Every one is burned out once or twice
casually. A business isn't respectable until it has received its baptism
of fire. But fire is of no importance. The one thing that inconveniences
a Jap is an earthquake. Consequently, he arranges his house that it
shall fall lightly as a bundle of broom upon his head. Still further
safeguarding himself, he has no foundations, but the corner-posts rest
on the crowns of round stones sunk in the earth. The corner-posts take
the wave of the shock, and, though the building may give way like an
eel-trap, nothing very serious happens. This is what epicures of
earthquakes aver. I wait for mine own experiences, but not near a
suspected district such as the Burning Mountain.

It was only to escape from one terror to ano