At Kamakura an immediate answer to the letter he brought was not forthcoming, and to kill the time he strolled far down the curved beach. The usual breeze was lacking. A haze as fine as gossamer had drawn itself over the sky, and through it gulls were calling plaintively. Here and there on the sea-wall women were spreading fish-nets, and along the causeway trudged blue-legged peasant-women, their backs bent beneath huge loads of brushwood. In one place a bronze-faced fisherman in a fantastic _kimono_ on which was painted sea-monsters and hobgoblins in crimson and orange, seated on the gunwale of his _sampan_ drawn above the shingle, watched a little girl who, with clothing clutched thigh-high, was skipping the frothy ripples as if they were ropes of foam. A mile from the town he met a regiment of small school-boys, in indigo-blue and white _kimono_, marching two and two like miniature soldiers, a teacher in European dress at either end of the line--future Oyamas, Togos and Kurokis in embryo.
They were coming from Enoshima, the hill-island that rises in the bay like an emerald St. Michael, where in a rocky cave, looking seaward, dwells holy Ben-ten, the Buddhist Goddess of Love. Daunt could see its masses of dark green foliage with their pink veinings of cherry-trees, and the crawling line of board-walk, perched on piling, which gave access from the mainland when the tide was in. On its height, if anywhere, would be coolness. He filled his pipe and set off toward it along the sultry sand. The hot dazzle of the sun was in his face. There was no movement in the crisp leaves of the bamboo trees and the damp heat beat up stiflingly from the gray glare. Somewhere in the air, stirless and humid, there rested a faint, weedy smell like a steaming sea-growth in a tidal ooze.
Daunt's pipe sputtered feebly, and, girding at the heat, he hurled it at a handful of blue ducks that plashed tiredly in the gray-green heave, and watched them dive, to reappear far away, like bobbing corks. He wished he could as easily scatter the blue-devils that dogged him.
He drew a sigh of relief as he reached the long elevated board-walk and shook the sand from his shoes. Underneath its shore-end a fisherman sat in the stern of a boat fishing with cormorants. A row of the solemn birds sat on a pole projecting over the water, each tethered by a string whose end was tied to the man's wrist. They seemed to be asleep, but now and then one would plunge like a diver, to reappear with a fish wriggling in its beak. Daunt watched them listlessly a moment, then, passing beneath a great bronze _torii_, he slowly climbed the single shaded street that staggered up the hill between the multitudes of gay little shops running over with colored sea-shells, with grotesque lanterns made of inflated fish-skins, with carved crystal and pink and white coral--up and up, by old, old flights of mossy steps, under more ancient trees, by green monuments and lichen-stippled Buddhas, till the sea below crawled like a wrinkled counterpane. Daunt knew a tea-house on the very lip of the cliff, the _Kinki-ro_--"Inn of the Golden Turtle"--and he bent his steps lazily in its direction.