With a shout of terror, I leaped up, and found myself reeling about a matted floor, in the dim light of a tiny lamp. An instant later the floor heaved and rocked under me with a sickening motion that flung me to my knees. All around I could hear the creak and groan of straining timbers. Above me my dizzy eyes made out a ceiling of odd-patterned bamboo-work and swaying walls whose gilt panels glinted in the faint light.
The screens of the end wall suddenly brightened, then shot open, and through the gap Yoritomo came darting towards me, lantern in hand.
“Earthquake!” he cried, springing across to extinguish my little night-lamp, which was on the point of jarring from its shelf.
The floor steadied with the passing of the shock. I crawled from under the mosquito net and staggered to my feet. Yoritomo seized me by the sleeve, and dragged me out the way he had come. I heard Kohana calling to us to hasten. We turned a corner, and saw her dart towards us across a room, beyond which gleamed a square of early daylight. Again the floor lurched. We all three sprawled prone upon the mats, while about us the rafters and beams creaked louder than before and the walls seemed toppling to crush us.
“This way!--the shutters are open--this way, my lord!” shrilled Kohana. She plucked at Yoritomo’s sleeve, and scrambled back, tossing about in a manner that would have been irresistibly comic but for the terror of the moment.
We followed as best we could, now crawling, now staggering half erect, like drunkards. Through it all Yoritomo clung fast to his lantern, too dazed to extinguish it, yet fearfully conscious of the peril of fire. All around me things were reeling. I clutched at a swaying wall-post, a few feet short of the gap in the wooden shutters that closed in the outer side of the veranda. Before I could glance about, a fearful shock flung me across the veranda and out into a bed of roses.
To my sorrow, I found that roses in Japan have thorns. Also I caught a glimpse of the massive tiled eaves seemingly about to pitch upon me. I leaped out of the roses, clear across a path, and fetched up with a skip and a trip, coming down squarely in a bed of purple irises. In perfect unison with my own arrival at stability, the earth spasms ceased as suddenly as they had begun.