Kakemono

Geologists state that Fuji San is a volcano, a young volcano, 12,365 feet high. Philologists add that San is derived from a Chinese term meaning mountain, and is not the familiar Japanese title which we render by Mr., Lord, or Master; while Fuji is, they declare, a word of Aino origin. And then they all fall silent.

These are the facts: the material, provable facts, such as western text-books publish. But to Japan, Fuji San is much more, and most of this is not text-book fact.

National tradition says that Fuji arose in a single night, and at the same time Lake Biwa, one hundred and forty miles away, was suddenly formed. There is a legend that, in those far-away days of mukashi, mukashi—once upon a time—the Elixir of Life was taken to the top of the mountain, where it still remains. And popular belief declares that all the cinders and ashes brought down by the pilgrims’ feet are carried each night back to the summit of Fuji.

To the people, Fuji is sacred; holy to some as the abiding-place of the Goddess Ko-no-hana-saku-ya-hime, She who makes the Blossoms of the Trees to Bloom, but sacred to all for its majesty, its unutterable beauty. The peasants of the country-side call Fuji Oyama, Honourable Mountain; and to the people Fuji San is Lord and Master. Deep in their hearts, and unassailable by western facts, the worship of his beauty and his power lies throbbing. During that brief six weeks of summer when Fuji’s wind-swept sides alone are climbable, the pilgrims come in thousands, in ten thousands. They dress themselves in white from head to foot. They carry long staves of pure white wood in their hands, each stamped with the temple crest, and in bands and companies they climb the mountain. And always the leader at their head, his staff crowned with a tinkling mass of bells, like tiny cymbals, chants the hymn of Fuji. From base to summit, as the white-clad pilgrims climb, the tinkling cymbals clash, and the voice of the leader rises loud at each refrain:

“We are going, we are going to the top.”

Above the clash of the bells the chorus echoes:

“To the top, to the top, to the top.”

“We are going,” chants the leader, and the tiny cymbals clash—“We are going, we are going to the top.”

The western facts of modern text-books cannot touch the meaning of this mountain; the love of its long curving line which permeates the nation’s art, the adoration of its beauty, and the reverence of its power.

Already in a time which to us upstart western nations is almost mukashi, mukashi, in the days before King Alfred burnt the cakes, a Japanese poet had caught and expressed the feeling of the nation for its mountain: for he wrote of Fujiyama as

And to-day the God Protector watches still, and yearly the people come, in the white garb of pilgrims, chanting to his shrine.

For six short summer weeks they come. Then the winds rush down, the snow falls, the tempests rage, and Lord Fuji lives alone. No human being has yet stayed a winter on his summit, and even in the summer weeks the winds will blow the lava blocks from the walls of the rest-houses, and sometimes the pilgrim from the path. For Fuji stands alone, not one peak among a range, but utterly alone. Rising straight out of the sea on one side, and from the great Tokyo plain on the other, his twelve thousand three hundred and sixty-five feet, in two long curving lines of exquisite grace, rise up and up into the blue, and not one inch of one foot is hidden or lost; it is all there, visible as a tower built on a treeless plain. It dominates the landscape. It can be seen from thirteen provinces; and from a hundred miles at sea the pale white peak of Fuji floats above the blue.

It was a day in the beginning of August, in the very middle of those hot three weeks which are the great festival of Fuji San, in the simmering dawn of a summer’s day that we left Tokyo for Subashiri. As the train approached Gotemba the whole crowded carriageful of Japanese looked eagerly for Fuji. The train was climbing slowly by a mountain stream, and we were all looking, looking, beyond the dark green pine-trees of the river’s bank. Suddenly, for one dazzling moment, the deep blue cone of Fuji lay pillowed on a bank of clouds in the middle of the clear blue sky. Then, swiftly, the clouds rolled up and up. Fuji San was gone. The whole carriageful gave vent to those long strangled h’s of admiration and delight, and with a murmured “Fuji San seeing have” sank back on their heels on the cushions.

Gotemba is the nearest railway station to Fujiyama, and the highest. It lies a thousand feet up. Being the most accessible, it is the most usual starting-point for the climb, but it is not the most picturesque. A wonderful line of trams now connects Gotemba with Subashiri, and even with Yoshida, a place half round the base of the mountain. We were to start from Subashiri and come down to Yoshida, and return by the lakes. So from the station we walked up the straggling, badly kept street of Gotemba, where every house is a hotel and every hotel hangs out many advertisements in the shape of cotton streamers twelve feet long and six inches wide, which are attached by rings to bamboo poles. So through groves of white and blue and brown banners all adorned with beautiful Chinese symbols we walked to the tramway.

A dive through a wooden archway between two tea-houses, where a ticket-hole and a wooden barrier composed the station, and we were there. The trams stood under the archway; the lines were lost in the black cindery mud—and they were both Japanese—the tram-lines, just rows of knitting-needles and laid very close together, the trams diminished by the national taste for the national needs to a little oblong box like a stunted bathing-machine. Our tram stood from ground to roof perhaps some five feet high. By taking off our hats we could just manage to sit down, and by judiciously fitting our knees into one another like elaborate dovetailing we got in width-ways, and we only got in at all by entering the door sideways. Fat people do not travel in Japanese trams—not unless they have a ladder and sit on the roof. The only way to insinuate luggage is to coax it through the window-frames, which, as there were only two to a side, were almost once and a half times the width of the door, not more. In the Fuji tramways pilgrims’ hats are not admitted. This is no prohibition. It is an impossibility, for the diameter of the pilgrim hat, which is twice as large as the largest halo, is equal in size to the width of the entire tram. So the pilgrims hang their huge circles of straw hats, like scooped-out orange halves, outside; and our tram before it started became a new kind of armoured train.

In this dumpy bathing-box we had room for four a side. We took five and thought it empty; smiled at six; submitted to seven; where an eighth would have disposed himself I do not know, he would certainly have got in, but the puzzle would have been to have found a vacant cubic foot of space for his occupation. Trams are never full in Japan. There is always room for more, if the more arrive. In this case the more got in at a small junction outside the back lanes of Gotemba. They got in, three of them, and with huge bundles too. Then the conductor looked round inquiringly and smiled, whereupon two polite pilgrims of lighter build than the newcomers gave up their seats and wedged themselves into the window-frames, while the bundles were deposited on the continuous strata of passenger. What happened to the third I do not know. He got in.

Then we started, really started, for there was no other halting-place, no village or station between here and Subashiri. Nothing but a broad, bare sweep of upward-tending common, where multitudes of wild flowers grew out of the cindery soil.

As we went on, the faintly curving common, which always sloped round and up, grew wilder and wilder. There were fewer flowers on the black soil. Sometimes the cinders lay all bare in large dull patches against the coarse grass. We were on the broad swelling slope of Fuji, on the edge of the first ripple before it dies away into the smooth water of the plain below. And we were crawling slowly from the first to the second ripple as a fly crawls round the curve of an orange. Fuji himself was invisible. For all we could see he did not exist. Spread out before our eyes was only the endless swelling line of the green common, always curving round and up. From time to time our driver blew a melancholy thin note from a tiny copper horn shaped like a thickened comma and ornamented with a worked band of brass, a pathetic far-off note unknown to western scales.

Our tram-line was laid among the ample cinders of Fuji’s burnt-out fires, and sometimes the curves were very sharp. Then the conductor, balanced on the step and grasping the window-frame with both hands, jerked the tram towards him to keep it on the lines; and we rounded the curves in triumph. The compact mass of passenger which filled the tram interior looked on unperturbed, while those in the window-frames kindly adjusted their weight to assist the conductor. And the melancholy thin note of the copper horn travelled over the long slope of the upward-tending common as we crawled slowly on.

In the midst of a perfect stocking-heel of knitting-needles, which all looked as though they were about to begin violently knitting at once, the tram stopped, and the compact mass of passenger disintegrated itself slowly. Having been the first to enter we were the last to detach ourselves from the general lump, and when we did recover a separate entity the knitting-needles lay gleaming in the cindery mud—and there was nothing else. We stumbled on over them for some time, until a ticket-hole in a sentry-box restored our belief that it was a stopping-place and not an accident. So we stood still and shouted for our tea-house boy by name. He came running, in long, tight-fitting, blue trousers like thick cotton hose and a blue tunic; and he was a girl, a pretty bright-coloured girl with daintily coiffured hair; and we all set off for the tea-house.

Subashiri is another straggling ill-kept street, all tea-houses and long cotton banners tied to bamboo poles, and our tea-house was the last of them all. It lay on the very edge of Fuji, and when we left it, after all our preparations had been completed, our lunch eaten, our guide engaged, we stepped straight on to the endless curve of upward-tending common.

I should have said our horses stepped, for the first stage of Fuji San is climbable on horses, pack-horses of a unique Japanese breed, which bite. They are harnessed with elaborate trappings in scarlet and gold, saddled with huge wooden saddles, rising like the prow of a ship behind, and sloping so steeply that the middle is one long knife-blade ridge, and only a tight hold of the stirrups prevents the rider from falling. All ride straddle-legged. I do not recommend Japanese pack-horses for pleasure, comfort, or security.

We plodded along over the bare common with its eternal long sweep upwards, like the swell of a great Atlantic roller, and the freshness and the coldness seemed to lift us out of Japan and carry us miles and miles north, to the chill summer of a northern land. The path which cut winding across the long up-sweep of the green common was black as ink, and shining with the wet of mountain clouds. Fuji was invisible, but as the deep rumble of the thunder, deadened behind the thick white clouds which bounded path and common, rolled slowly out of hearing it was as if Great Fuji spoke. Behind the mist the presence of the “honourable mountain” could be surely felt. Already the world seemed sunk away and the pilgrimage begun.

Over the green common the pack-horses plodded. Our guide and the little girl groom, in her thick blue hose and dark blue tunic, were far behind talking in peace. The big drops of rain which the thunder brought had ceased to fall, and the freshness and the chill coming after the tropical heat of the plain stung strength to life again. Even the pack-horses grew less sulky, and urging made them shuffle into something near a trot. But this outbreak of energy, which lasted perhaps eighty yards, was more than enough for comfort, though it added to experience, for like the knights of old who “clove” their enemies in two, we too “clove,” but in another direction. It was painful. So the horses sank back into their bad-tempered pace, and the wide common swept onwards and upwards.

After awhile the monotony of the black path crossing the green common was varied by stunted bushes which, gradually growing bigger and bigger, actually enclosed the cinder-track as English hedges an English lane. But the change was brief and the sloping green world with the long black line of path winding across it came back again.

The pack-horses plodded bad-temperedly on, and the structure of that saddle seemed to be petrifying in my frame. A blot in the path which had lain for so long on the edge of the common came gradually nearer until it widened into a deep oblong pit filled with the rakings of a thousand fires. Through this we ploughed our way, and the loose cinders came over the feet of the horses. With a good deal of exertion we climbed out again, then a few yards, a sharp turn, and we passed an empty row of sheds, for we had reached the Mma gaeshi—“Horse-turn-back” station. My horse evidently understood the Chinese characters of the tea-house sign, for no sooner did he see them than he promptly walked into one of the sheds, with me clinging affectionately to his neck to avoid the shock of the roof on my chest. But promptly as he walked in, the little girl groom and the boy guide were prompter; with a rush they were at his head, hauling him out again. He objected strongly, snarling like an ill-used dog, and so did I, but we were backed out of the shed at last.

We did not “horse-turn-back,” we were going to take our steeds on one more station. The stations on Fuji, which are nothing but the native tea-house, rougher, ruder, and less scrupulously clean, are mostly built right across the actual path itself. You go in at one side and out at the other.

Up to the very threshold of the tea-house the sweep of the wet green common rolled, like a gigantic, motionless wave that never breaks. It was a bare wild world bounded only by the pale walls of the distant clouds. But on the other side the path plunged steeply into a thick interminable wood, where the great trees dripped slowly, with the heavy persistency of Fate, and the dark trunks glistened uncertainly with wet. The little girl groom and the boy guide came and led the horses carefully, for the path was very steep, and the thick roots of the trees stretched like cords above the cinders.

This stage was short. At the next tea-house, which lay confined as a lake between the walls of the mountain, we said “good-bye” to the ill-tempered horses and to the little girl groom. The boy was to take us to the top and down to Yoshida. Then the wood, which the tea-house had interrupted no more than a buoy the ocean, stretched on. The great trees dripped coldly, with that chill feel of damp green things that makes the springtime of the north: coldly fresh as though the running sappy life were chill as mountain water, as though the growing trees were enwrapped in invisible ice and the very air made of impalpable snow.

In the midst of the wood stood a little desolate shrine, its floor was nothing but the black stamped earth, its roof of roughest thatch kept down with lava-stones, and only the tiny altar had walls at all. Behind a sort of wooden bar the gods sat dim, and a mournful old priest was their only attendant.

Straight towards the altar led the mountain path. This was the gateway of Lord Fuji. Each path that climbs the “honourable mountain” leads through a temple to the temple on the top. At the first shrine the pilgrim buys his long white staff, stamped with the temple crest, which he carries with him upwards to the summit.

We bought our staves. And the old man, thrusting a thin bar of iron like a stick of sealing-wax into the charcoal fire, burnt the crest of Subashiri’s shrine into the clean white wood, and with a courteous gesture he said the prayer which we, unknowing, had left unsaid. Lord Fuji is neither fierce nor exclusive, all the world may come as pilgrims through his gateways. From the great Sun-Goddess the Mikado sprang, and the people of Japan are all kin to the Shintō gods, but the Shintō gods themselves welcomed the Lord Buddha when he came. Side by side with the older gods Buddha’s temples stand to-day, and Lord Buddha, too, once said, “All men are one”; and again, “All living things are brothers to mankind”; for Buddha, like the modern scientists, declared the world, all worlds, and all that in them is, one, in substance one.

Three steps from the temple and the trees of the wood shut over it as waters over a stone. It was lost. Lord Fuji is greater than his temples. With the help of our staves we climbed on up the steep cinder-path, till the great green trees, dripping slowly, dwindled, drew back, were ended.

On the very edge of the wood was a tea-house, the Ichi-gō, No. 1 station, a roughly built wooden-walled tea-house, on the edge of whose matting, with our feet on the path, we sat and drank tea, innumerable egg-bowls of hot green tea. While we were sitting here a whole party of pilgrims, in their white hose trousers, their white tunics tucked into their white obi, and their wash-basin-big straw hats, came down the path. They turned into the tea-house, and one old man, dropping on to the matting, rolled himself into a corner and was covered with futon. He had caught cold on the top, and was perfectly exhausted with pain and fatigue. But as he lay in the corner, clutching the futon to him as though to press a concrete warmth into his numbed bones, there was in his eyes a look of dwelling content that not all the pain nor all the fatigue could overcome. He had climbed from the threshold to the sanctuary of Fuji; had knelt by the cloud-swept altar; felt the might of the God in the winds of his summit, in the still depths of his crater; caught up with Lord Fuji on high, he had looked down upon earth. What now was pain or fatigue?

The path from the tea-house struck out abruptly across the mountain, and we soon stood above the trees, stood on the bare cinder-slope that is Fuji. It was very much like walking up an ash-heap or a ballast-mound, and about as beautiful. Below us everything was hidden in a shifting mist; above, twenty feet of cinder-slope ended in a white wall. It was like climbing a black rope hung between two clouds.

After the ballast-heap came a lava-bed, where a molten river of lava had dried itself into high rocks and deep cracks, as the ice of a glacier. We crossed it obliquely, and in the twilight saw neither beginning nor end, neither from where it came nor to where it went; but its pinnacles and crevasses, its tumbled waves and jagged, piled-up ridges, lay lustreless and dark, as though of coal-black ice.

Once across this lava-glacier, and out of the dip formed by its bed, we stood on a sort of self-contained ash-heap, and looked down that long slope of Fuji which already lay below us.

Dimly through the faint floating veil of mist we could see all the green earth bare and smooth, with a darker line of hills as a child’s bank of mud curving round the black surface of the lakes. We were so high up, the lakes so far away, and the whole air so heavy with moisture that they looked in the misty light like polished slabs of black rock dropped into the green earth as one might sink stepping-stones into a lawn. As we watched the light seemed to thicken, the white mists spread through it as motes in a sunbeam, gathered themselves together. Swiftly they hid the black lakes; and boiling within the dark curve of the hills in billows of smoke, boiled over the mud-bank of hills, and blotting them out; submerged the green earth, and flowing rapidly upwards hid all the long slope of Fuji beneath a shoreless sea of fog.

Again we stood on a steep cinder-heap on the black rope which hung from void to void—alone.

And impenetrable Fuji remained. We simply climbed a cinder-path which ran from end to end of a never-ending, ever-retreating circle of cloud. And still within this grey-white circle we reached the Ni-gō, or No. 2 station. Here we were to stop the night, because No. 2 is larger and more comfortable than No. 4, and No. 8 was too far away.

No. 2 lay on the side of the path, its face looking over the precipice and its three sides well within a scooped-out hole in the cinder-heap. It was nothing but an ordinary Japanese room, only its walls were of solid wood, protected outside by cut blocks of lava, and inside with a lining of folded futon on shelves. Far away in the back of the room the charcoal fire was sunk in a sort of earth well, so that you could sit on the matting with your legs in the hole, absorb warmth, or do your cooking. Otherwise the tea-house was bare matted space on which each comer staked out a claim for himself with his luggage.

Having chosen a good site in a corner less draughty than the rest of the enclosure, we proceeded to unpack and wash. Just outside the middle of the open wall of the house, and full on the pathway of Fuji, stood a large waterbutt. Having been directed by the family—an amiable man, an indifferent wife, and an inquisitive boy—to wash outside, I stepped on to the pathway. The tub was half full of water and looked very like the ordinary bath-tub of Japan. It was the first time I had seen a bath out of doors, though they figure so largely in travellers’ tales; still there was nothing else, so boldly I plunged the top half of myself into the water.

A simultaneous scream from the man, the wife and the boy, brought me up dripping and bewildered.

What had I done?

Not sinned against their moral code, surely. No—worse. Washed in the drinking-water!

Luckily there was more, enough for endless tea that night, and to-morrow fresh water could be fetched. But my wash came to an abrupt end. Of course what I ought to have done was to unearth a brass pan tucked away behind the tub, take down a bamboo dipper from a lava-block, dip out water from the tub into the pan and wash in that. Quite simple, naturally, when it was all explained and the pan and the dipper produced, but all problems always are simple after the explanation.

The amiable man remained amiable even after this catastrophe, and the indifferent wife had not been shaken from her indifference save for the space of one brief scream, while the small boy, at such an exhibition of curious manners on the part of the Ijin San, grew more inquisitive than ever, and we fried ham, ate tinned tongue, cut slices of bread, and drank foreign wine under a close and exhaustive series of comments which were questions.

It grew dark rapidly as we ate. And as relays of pilgrims came in out of the night to fling themselves down on the matting, swallow cupfuls of hot tea and exchange long compliments with the man, the wife, and the guide, and disappear again into the night, we congratulated ourselves. No. 4 must have been very full. At eight o’clock, when the amado were drawn and the tea-house became a compact box, No. 2 had no guests but the Ijin San.

It was time to go to bed. The man put out the one smoking lamp by the fire-pit which had cast such lurid yellow lights on the white clothes of the pilgrims as they sat and drank, and such murky, gigantic shadows on the rest of the room; the boy went to bed in a corner, and we rolled ourselves up in our carefully Keatinged futon and tried to sleep.

It was cold. There were fleas. And Fuji sent us down a draught which simply whistled through the wooden walls, the folded futon and the lava-blocks. And the sense of the unusual, of the rest-house, the cinder-path and of Fuji, crept into our slumbers, holding back sleep.

When we awoke it was already five o’clock and the amado were open. The boy, careering over the matting, was detailing how the Ijin San slept.

We shook ourselves out of our futon and went outside to wash—not in the waterbutt.

Already, when we stepped upon the cinder-path, the unseen sun had touched the white clouds lying like islands in the blue beneath. And as we watched they coloured blushing, till in blood-red pools they studded thick the air below. They lay away out over the land, moving slowly through the vapoury mist. It was as if the air was half precipitated, the atmosphere made visible. We looked down on to the world below and saw it as one sees white stones at the bottom of deep water.

The hidden sun was rising swiftly, and as he rose the blood-red pools faded out; the vapoury white air grew thinner, seemed slowly drying, until clear and invisible, we looked through it and saw the green earth stretching away and away to the level line of the horizon; while midway the little lakes lay sepia-black upon the green, curving so comfortably into the tiny crescent of the hills all dark with purple shadows. A fresh-washed world lying green and flat at the bottom of 7,000 feet of atmosphere.

It was cold, the water in the brass pan colder, and tingling with sudden chill we ran rapidly up the path past the scooped-out hollow where the rest-house hid—and stood transfixed.

Above us, touching us, and black against a sky all blue and liquid as the living sea, was Fuji San.

His clear-cut lines rose up quickly, and the mountain, whose slope our hands were holding, seemed to draw back its summit that our eyes might see it, so close it lay, so steep above. Round as a tower it rose in curves of grace, a black lighthouse springing towards the sky, delicate as Giotto’s lily tower: slender in its grace and fragile. This was no rude Colossus, mighty with brute strength, but a god, great in grace, and strong, because divine.

Upwards the soaring lines rose up, coal-black, and the growing light caught faintly at a wine-red patch where the sullen fires were sleeping, caught and turned it redder; redly it glowed, smouldering into life, the living life of Fujiyama.

Beneath the rounded dip of the summit were two tiny cracks, and the sky which lay so blue within the crescent curve seemed straining through. Here was neither tree nor rock, neither snow nor glacier, nothing to hide the form and substance of the mountain. Quite smoothly it rose, deep black, one great dead cinder.

It was perfectly fine when at last towards six o’clock we started to climb; and the pale blue sky lay flat behind Fuji, as the background in a picture.

Our path was narrow, just a foot-wide track beaten firm in the steep cinder-slope. And we climbed, till at No. 4 we stopped to rest.

The stations on Fuji are all much alike. A matted room lined with futon, and always a square well at the back with a charcoal fire and an ever-boiling kettle. As you go up the wooden walls are hidden outside beneath huge blocks of cut lava, hidden deeper and deeper, while the roofs are fastened down with lava-stones. Yet every winter Fuji blows down the built-up walls, tears off the roofs, and sends the big blocks hurtling down the slope. Even in summer the roof and walls lose portions of themselves, which, rolling, rolling, rolling, roll for ever downwards. Some of the stations are smaller, some larger, some cleaner, this is the only difference. In each you sit down on the matting to rest, and the crouching man over the fire brings you hot tea, and rice-paste cakes, while a far-away figure dimly seen through the smoke of the charcoal fire asks your guide where you come from, where you are going to, when you started, and what time you will be back. And your guide replies, with endless details as to your behaviour if you are an Ijin San, and the amount you have already expended on tea and tips.

It was a glorious morning and one with the added charm of uncertainty.

Floating in the blue above and below us were clouds, large white clouds which would swoop down on the land, suddenly, and hide it as under a napkin. Then the black cone of Fuji, a cone with its top bitten out in two little bites, would pull down a thick flap out of the blue, and disappear. Mountain, sky and land shifted and shone, passed in an eddy of broken glimpses, stayed in a still-set picture, or were lost under covering clouds.

But always the steep little path led up through the loose cinder-slope, and always we climbed.

The steepest and most tiring part of the climb, except the natural staircase below the summit, is between the sixth and eighth station, where the path, leaving the cinder-slope, runs along a ridge of solid lava, rising like the long root of a tree high up out of the cinders, and loses itself among great black blocks. To cross this was something like jumping over sea rocks when the tide is out, only instead of lying flat these went steeply upward.

As we went toiling painfully along, feeling very like ants crawling up a tree-trunk, the clash of tiny cymbals, the faint echoes of talk and laughter came floating up. It was a whole party of pilgrims who came swinging up hand over hand, as it were, and as easily as if they were skating on good ice. We first saw them as we stood propped against the lava-blocks, panting, and they were far below us, tiny as dwarfs, little spots of white on the dead-black slope, away down in the second storey as we were in the sixth. But as we laboriously climbed our inches they came on swiftly—on, up, on, past us; the little bells clashing and chiming gaily to the talk and laughter. Our guide told us they were kurumaya who had started from Gotemba that morning at two, and who would get back there again before dark, to work the next day as usual. Anything like the pace at which those men came up the steep slope of Fuji—for the most part straight over the long beds of loose cinders—I have never seen. It was like sailors running up a rope. They came up more swiftly than most people would care to go down, without an effort, with plenty of breath left to talk and laugh, and with that supreme ease which only comes when doing something well within the margin of one’s power.

We were very glad to rest at No. 8, though our friends the kurumaya had gone on cheerfully. It was such a nice large tea-house, beautifully clean, and the hot egg-bowls full of tea were peculiarly refreshing. Without the continuous tea I do not know how one would climb Fuji at all. The air at 13,000 feet freezes, but the sun of Japan pours down relentlessly, fierce as the tropics, while the hot dust drifts down one’s throat, into one’s very skin; and when the wind blows you need to cling to the shifting cinders with the very soles of your feet. Shelter on the bare slopes of Fuji there is none. Frequently the wind is so fierce even in the six brief weeks of summer that to stand upright is impossible, for Fuji’s summit is in the heart of the storm.

Between the eighth and the ninth station the path was easy, but we climbed it wrapped in a sudden cloud. All the long sweep of earth below was gone. The green Tokyo plain, where the dark thunder-clouds lay brooding in the still blue air, and the great fingers of light which struck so fiercely on the little lakes beneath the mud bank of the hills, the dark cone, so near above us, all were gone, sponged out by a big cloud. And we were only climbing up a steep black rope that hung between two infinities, climbing out of space, into space.

From the ninth and last station you climb into Fuji’s stronghold by a giant staircase of rough lava. It is necessary here to hoist yourself painfully up by the aid of guides or your own two hands. We climbed on slowly. The lava was quite hot, for the staircase lies cut within the slope, and gets and keeps the heat.

On the steepest step of the staircase we passed an old, old man, and an old, old woman, both in the white garb of pilgrims, and each with a guide on either side to help them on. The last pitiful effort of the old woman to drag herself up on to a lava-block had exhausted her completely; she lay huddled against the stones gasping, her eyes shut. The old man kneeling by her side was holding the wrinkled hand in both of his trying to encourage her. The cracked old voice, broken with quavering pants for breath, sounded strangely on the desolate black staircase as we came by.

“We are going,” he chanted—“we are going to the top.”

And the four guides in their fresh young voices sang: “To the top, to the top, to the top.”

“We are going,” repeated the old man, softly stroking the hand he held—“we are going to the top.”

And again the four young voices rang out vigourously: “To the top, to the top, to the top.”

It was the pilgrims’ hymn, and the old woman heard it. Slowly she stirred, her mouth opened with a sigh of utter weariness, but still she too sang in the thinnest trickle of a voice, broken with quavering sobs:

“To the top, to the top, to the top.”

It was the most pathetic music I have ever heard. Indeed the wave of faith was great which could carry such as these to the top of Fuji San.

Up the steep steps, cut so deep within the lava, we hurried panting, eager we, too, to reach the top. But the summit of Fujiyama is a sanctuary, and on its threshold stood two priests.

As we stumbled up over the last step, and on to the path which runs around the crater, they barred our way, standing motionless behind a white-wood wicket. In the breeze their black robes fluttered, their tonsured heads were bare.

Surprised we paused. All the climber’s hurry fell away. This was not another peak to be raced up and raced down by the indifferent tourist, not another ascent to be added to the list of the mountaineer. Fuji San is sacred. Enter into his courts as into the temple of the Lord, humbly, reverently, or at least with a sincere respect.

The two priests leaned over the wicket as we came up and bowed; but they did not open it. One stretched out his hand for our staves to stamp them with the temple’s crest. On the summit of Fuji San the crest is stamped in vermilion ink. In the temples at the foot it is burnt with a red-hot iron: vermilion is a royal colour.

The other priest, holding a bamboo dipper, came slowly towards us. Something he was saying as he moved, in the nasal sing-song of the priest. Then he motioned to us to put out our hands and slowly, carefully, he poured the ice-cold water over them. And they bade us enter. It was the rite of purification, the symbol of the contrite heart which all who cross great Fuji’s threshold must surely bring.

Once inside the wicket the path, beaten wide here, ran between a breast-high wall of lava which, built like a rampart on the edge of Fuji, hid the sheer sides of the mountain and a row of low wooden huts, the rest-houses—ran between these and on, up to where the black edge of the crater, like the rim of a broken cup, cut the sky in sharp clear lines.

For the moment it was fine, and leaving our luggage in one of the huts we hurried on, past the rest-houses, on past the rampart wall, on along the little beaten track which still led steeply upwards. Then sharply it turned, and we stood wedged within a crack in the crater wall, with the sharp black rim rising high on either hand.

We were alone on Fuji’s side, before his altar. And there was no sound.

In a stillness as of death the vast crater stretched 800 feet below, and the grey ash-dust gathering through two centuries lay thick and smooth as sand upon the shore. Steeply the cinder-walls rose up, rose round, and held the ash. Only in front of us, across half a mile of silent dust, a wide crack in the cup-like rim showed two tall poles and many floating banners, there where the temple’s wicket crossed the pathway from Gotemba.

Grey ash and cinder, that was Fuji San. Once a mighty fire, a fire two and a half miles round, with 13,000 feet of cinders, and a bed of ash 2000 feet across. And now, dying or asleep, rigid as death, grown grey and cold, but yet mighty as the sea, powerful as the storm; Nature’s eternal force made visible. And that still life which rolls around our human incompleteness, mysterious and unknown, drew near. Almost it seemed as though we touched the force without, the unresting naked flame of being which threads through the spheres. Almost we touched—but saw only the corpse of Life, for Nature keeps her secrets....

In a silence as of death, the vast still crater stretched for a circle of two miles, and the grey ash-dust gathering through two centuries lay thick and smooth—the pall of a mighty God.

Steeply the cindery walls rose up, rose round in jagged points like the rim of a broken cup, and into the crack there came two white-clad pilgrims. They knelt bareheaded on the edge of the crater, looking down, and the murmured sing-song of their prayers broke the silence. Old and grizzled, their bullet-heads were bent before the altar in a Faith reverent and sincere.

Truly the might of God had dwelt on Fuji; the breath of Eternal Life had rested here—rested and passed, or was passing; and the pilgrim in his faith holds sacred the print of that footstep. He prays to that part of the Godhead incarnate in Fuji—Fuji so perfect in his grace, so stirring in his strength.

In western lands the Roman Catholic peasant prays before his altar, but the symbol of his Godhead is often reduced to a composite Christ in pink and white plaster. If Truth must have a form—and mankind believes with difficulty in abstract nouns—it surely is a purer, grander faith to feel God visible in Fuji’s curves, dwelling in his sleeping fires, than to hem Him in a building made by man and seat Him on an ugly altar between groups of tawdry flowers.

The little narrow path which led down into the crack led also round the summit below the jagged edges of the crater’s rim, and we followed it. Outside the crack it went steeply downwards before it turned, for above, the cindery slopes of Fuji were steaming white in the sunshine, and the ground was very hot. It is but a patch, still evidence that Fuji sleeps. He is not dead.

Then the wandering pathway, a black thread on the loose cinder-slope, led up again, round and down into a tiny fold among the cinders, and suddenly, quickly as a camera snaps, the white clouds, loosely piled upon the mountain, were riven asunder, and the whole world shimmering in a golden haze that touched but did not hide it, lay at our feet.

Straight down below, 13,000 feet away, it lay. All the long line of the river Fujikawa, gleaming blue-black as rough-cast iron, among the orange sand-flats of its mouth. And the soft curves of the Yokohama peninsula, a smaller but more graceful Italy, floating, floating, on the water, purple-blue on azure blue.

And all beyond was the blue intensity of the infinite sea.

So near it looked, so clear that the steely line of the Fujikawa seemed a sword-blade one could stoop and reach. And leaning we looked from Fuji’s top as from a tower; but Fuji’s self we could not see. His cinder-slopes had vanished.

Straight down below there was the world, and we above it hung suspended 13,000 feet above the earth. Beyond, above, outside of it. Dear Earth, how still it lay, how beautiful!

And into my mind there floated the old, old words: “And He divided the land from the waters, and the dry land He called Earth.... And God looked and saw that it was good.”

Above the world, beyond it, we too could look and see, and we too “saw that it was good.”

Then the little wandering track, beaten firm by the feet of the pilgrims, led on, up and down, among the cinders of Fuji’s sides, and round to that great crack in the cup’s rim where the pathway from Gotemba reached the summit.

Here were crowds of people, all the pilgrims on Fuji San, pouring through the white-wood wicket, or buying draughts of the sacred “Golden Water” which is born in the depths of the crater.

As we stood drinking our little bowlful of the ice-cold water, the low boom of a Japanese temple bell came swaying through the air, and each jagged peak round the crater’s rim added its muffled echo to the bell’s deep boom.

The level space which formed the floor to this big crack was full of pilgrims old and young, men, women and little children, and they were all pressing forward between the tall poles, where the long banners tied top and bottom were stirring in the wind, to the little temple lying under the very edge of Fuji, as a nest beneath the eaves. The temple seemed full already, but the crowd, courteous for all their zeal, pressed forward gently, content, if they could not enter, to stay outside.

Again the low liquid boom came swaying through the air, prolonged by the muffled echoes of the jagged peaks. And we too walked towards the temple. But the patient crowd without reached already to the pathway, and must press back against the cinder sides as the long procession of black-robed priests, with copes and stoles and vestments of rich brocade, swept into the temple.

Then the liquid booming bell swayed out again—and was still; and the muffled echoes of the peaks, subdued and faint, lingered in the intense silence.

The priests had passed within.

The ash on the floor of the crater was soft and very thick. It lay in thin round flakes that broke between the fingers, and the feet sank into it, drawn under as on sand that is half-quick. It was like walking on piles of those sunlit flecks that carpet a beech-wood; but the light had gone out of these and left them pale and grey.

All around the black walls of the crater rose up into the sky, five hundred feet of sheer height. Shut into the crater pit with the dead ash sucking our feet we seemed to have come to the region where death lies behind—and birth is yet to come. We stood in the Place of Pause, in that Between which is Nothingness.

Smooth as the sand of the shore the ash stretched along. Loose and thick the flakes were piled, and the feet, drawn under, grew heavy.

What was beneath? Nothingness?

And a strange fear of falling through the loose ash into that Nothingness grew with each empty moment.

Faintly, far away, the stir of Life’s Birth reached into the void. It came from below, deep through the ash where a little clear trickle of water sang in the silence. Distinct, but so soft that the senses must needs strain to hear. Through the ash, beneath the ash, the water trickled, faint as a new-born breath. And its name it was Golden.

The hut when we reached it was empty, and it lay facing the lava-wall, the last of the row, and all of them were open in front, like cages at the Zoo.

The square pit with its charcoal fire was in front here, and we had to pass behind it to reach the unoccupied space at the back. As we crawled over the matting darkened by our own shadows, for the only light came through the open front, we almost stumbled over some one rolled up in a bundle of futon. It was the old, old woman of the morning. She was asleep, in the deep, dull sleep of utter exhaustion, and her wrinkled chin, dropped down, trembled, as she slept.

It was very cold in the hut, and we too were glad of futon and egg-bowls of hot tea, glad to eat our tinned tongue and slices of dry bread, and gladder still just to stay wrapt in the futon, and sleepily rest.

The landlord, like an image, sat on his heels in the well and never stirred. From time to time he put fresh pieces of charcoal on the fire with a pair of brass chopsticks; then the smoke, sweeping in dense waves through the room, would make us all cough abruptly, till it melted slowly away and the room was still.

Beyond the lava-wall the grey-white clouds lay herded as a fold of sheep, and we watched them mounting up and up, rolling against the wall, rising above it, sending thin wreaths and wisps of mists across the pathway, which stayed like ribbons in the air, and then sinking, dropped down again. Often they came up, and always rolled back beaten. Fuji’s summit is above the clouds, they could not scale it.

In twos and threes and little groups, the white-robed pilgrims stopped to sit on the edge of the matting and drink tea, and eat innumerable balls of rice rolled in a soft grated substance that looked to be, but was not, cheese—a thing unknown in this milkless land. So the pilgrims sat on the matting and ate their rice-balls, which the landlord, without moving his body a hair’s-breadth, produced and rolled, and sprinkled, and handed. And the acrid smoke from the charcoal fire drifted across the room, filling it.

Quite suddenly I awoke out of my sleep, to find some one on the floor beside me waking the old, old woman. It took her a long time to struggle out of that dense, deep sleep into a state of even drowsy consciousness. She sat up, bewildered, and when they told her she must go, get up, climb all that weary way down again, the old face seemed to shrink together in hopeless despair. There was a long dreary pause. Then the old, old woman bowed, the smile of courtesy upon her worn old face.

“Yoroshū gozaimas” (“As it honourably pleases you”), she said. And rising, she tottered out.

This flesh was more than weak, but the spirit was the spirit of her race—it sacrificed all things.

We were to sleep in Yoshida that night, and for us too it was time to go. So leaving our money on the edge of the fire-pit we crawled out of the hut. The image sitting on its heels never stirred; with one swift glance beneath the eyelids, he had reckoned the money to the last sen, but whether more or less than he expected, he remained immovable, magnificently unconscious, occupied solely in bowing us out. Had it been less than the proper charge we certainly should have heard of it through the guide, but as tea is never charged for, each visitor pays for it according to his rank, exigencies, generosity, and the status of the tea-house. In reality, of course, it is payment for attendance as well as tea.

The Japanese hold that no service performed can ever have a money equivalent. In their economy, money was never a real asset, as courage, knowledge or art, and they ignored it, when they did not despise it. So in the old days, those trades which had most to do with money, whose aim seemed to be the getting of money, were looked down on. Shopkeepers and merchants ranked below swordsmiths, peasants and artisans. Only the ignoble would choose such as a life’s work, and if to-day this idea has hindered commerce, if it has produced the low standard of some business men, and consequently the foreigner’s bad opinion of them, it has, on the other hand, lifted the nation out of the rut of sordid greed, made it seek after, and lay fast hold of, that which seems to it true—made of its people a race of men, of gentlemen, honourable, high-principled, and capable of indomitable devotion to their ideal.

We stepped off the summit of Fuji San into a wet white cloud, which was the sky of the earth below. For the first two stages the way down was the same as the way up, but at No. 8 the paths divided, the one to Yoshida leading away to the left.

After we had made a sort of semi-tour of the mountain we climbed over a lava-ridge and found ourselves in the centre of a black scoop in Fuji’s side that, coming from above, stretched interminably downwards. And the whole of the huge groove was a mass of the loosest, most shifting cinder. There was no path. One went down. At each step all the cinders on that part of Fuji slid bodily, tumbling over each other in their haste. You slid too, until the cinders, piling themselves up and up, reached the knee, and abruptly you stopped, only to pull out that leg and begin to slide again with the other. The rate at which one shot down was prodigious, and the method alarming. Each step seemed to start half the mountain rolling, rolling, for ever downwards, and there seemed no particular reason why the other half with you on it should not roll away too. Positively, as the torrent of cinders rolled and rolled and rolled, the conviction that Fujiyama must look smaller next morning grew upon me. Until with a flash of understanding I remembered the legend of the dust brought down by the pilgrims’ feet flying each night back to the mountain. And it seemed a very necessary explanation, and quite convincing too, when I looked at the tons and tons of cinders which my feet alone were sending down Fuji’s side.

After awhile the slope grew even steeper, and the cinders from black became a deep dull red. And still one shot downwards. Small patches of powdery, grey snow sprinkled with tiny round spots were tucked away here between the red cinders, and the whole slope was covered with the straw sandals of former pilgrims. They were scattered over the red cinders like a new kind of vegetation hardier than the rest, and there were thousands on thousands of them.

And still we shot downwards. At too steep an angle now to be brought up merely by the weight of the cinders, so that we were obliged to invent brakes with our more or less free foot, our extended arms, or the angle of our bodies; and we were very glad indeed of our staves to put any sort of term to the long uncomfortable slide.

It was a long while before we passed out of the zone of the waraji, and saw real little green things growing between the cinders. They looked utterly miserable and degenerate, but they did make the ballast solider, and the sliding easier.

It was a gigantic slide, but we brought up at last on a ridge of grey rock, over which we had to climb carefully, for it was full of holes. On the other side of this ridge the degenerate green weeds had grown into degenerate green plants; and after a few more slides and climbs the plants became bushes, stunted and miserable, but bushes, and we came out on to a sort of natural grass platform, before the rest-house of No. 4, Yoshida side. It was dirty, the first dirty house I had ever seen in Japan. Below us, as though stopped short by a word of command, “Thus far and no further,” were the trees; the tops of the nearest were on a level with the platform, but not one grew upon it.

With the cinder-slope behind us we stepped off the grass platform straight into the forest. It was a beautiful forest. First firs, and then, as we went downwards, green trees, small oaks and cryptomerias of all kinds.

To feet weary of ballast-heaps, the forest footpath was a rest refreshing, and the delight of growing trees and green fresh leaves after waraji and cinders, an enchantment. But Fuji had not finished his surprises or his trials. Soon the pathway disappeared from under our feet, and only the roots of the trees remained. On these we had to walk, and they were slippery, knotted, and far apart, and full of tangled holes that caught and tripped the feet.

A polite Japanese student came and walked with us a little way “to improve his English,” but his feet in their waraji stepped over the tree-roots faster than ours in our boots, and we were soon left alone again.

Gradually, as we went downwards, the forest altered from the austere wood of the mountain to the rich luxuriant wood of the plains, green with moss, covered with creepers, dripping with big juicy drops of water as though rich sap were oozing from every vein.

All through the wood there were tiny tea-houses, set under a tree and lost among the branches. We passed No. 1 at least seven times, each time certain that it really must be the real original No. 1, and that the “horse-turn-back” station, where we could get a basha to carry us to Yoshida, was necessarily “the next.” After the weary sliding down that abrupt slope, the muscles of one’s legs were all trembling with the strain, and the tree-roots, slippery and uncertain, became doubly difficult. We were still going down so steeply that the hollow of the pathway lay like a green chimney below us. Slowly up through this living funnel came the pilgrim’s chant.

“We are going,” and the little bells clashed out triumphant—“we are going to the top.”

Then the deep sing-song of the chorus, coming nearer with each syllable, grew louder:

“Top ... the top ... to the top.”

We waited while the chant coming up from the green depths below came nearer, came past us, went on.

From the green heights above it sounded down.

“We are going,” and the tiny cymbals clashed—“we are going to the top.”

And faintly echoing from above came the answer: “To the top ... the top ... top.”

And still the first stations succeeded one another, and the tired feet and the aching muscles grew more weary. The wood was dense as ever, but less steep, and at last there came earth as well as tree-roots for a pathway.

We passed through another station, half tea-house, half temple, where a man sat behind a tray of thin irons stamped with the temple’s crest, and where gods and tea-bowls filled the shelves. The path went through it and out again, under the trees, a path of good stamped earth. Then twisting suddenly it ended in four smooth green steps that led down into a natural amphitheatre, with tea-houses on each side. This was the Mma gaeshi—“horse-turn-back” station—Yoshida side. Away to the left were several square boxes on wheels, otherwise the stage was empty. It was, indeed, exactly like a “set” in an opera.

We hobbled, it was so difficult to walk on flat earth, to a tea-house and sat down demanding basha. Slowly a man entered right front, and crossing left centre tipped up a square box and waited. Then another man, entering left front, harnessed a horse to it. This took them half an hour, because they wanted four times too much for the drive to Yoshida, and at each refusal, at each expostulation, at each rebate, the one man dropped the square box down on the ground and the other gave up harnessing the horse. Meanwhile we drank tea and monotonously repeated our price. After half an hour the basha was finally harnessed, and crossing left front we got in.

This basha was simply a square box without a lid, mounted on wheels. You sat on a piece of matting spread at the bottom, leant against the wooden back and clutched hard at the sides to keep yourself in. The driver sat on the shaft and used his feet as a brake. The reins consisted of one length of straw rope attached to the left side of the horse’s head.

For the first half-hour the relief of stretching out one’s miserable, trembling legs was pure bliss, after that, basha-driving was pleasant but jolty, and after that it became renewed torture to endure the jolting, and the aches in one’s back and arms were vigorous and persistent. Road there was none, only two large ruts, in, over and among which we wandered.

The trees stopped as abruptly above the natural amphitheatre of Mma gaeshi as they had begun below the platform of No. 4. And for the whole two hours of our journey to Yoshida we travelled over an immense far-reaching common, one of the soft ripples at Fuji’s base. There was not a house or a village to be seen, nothing but the wide stretch of green common.

It was half-past five when the basha started out among the ruts, and the clear, colourless light of a northern evening—we were 3000 feet up—which is not cold, yet is so colourless, enclosed the earth. The sky was as bare of clouds as the common of landmarks; the one lay palely blue above, the other stretched subduedly green below. Here and there the green was crossed by long flushes of colour, with the red of tiny tiger-lilies, and the pale yellow of the evening primrose. Behind, Lord Fuji rose majestic. At first a line of fleecy cloud had lain above the deep green of the forest, and Fuji’s head was lost in mist, but at the sunset the clouds fell away lower and lower, until the whole long sweep of Fuji rose up triumphant into the blue.

It was but slowly that the basha jolted among the deep-cut ruts of the common, and but slowly that we travelled on, downwards.

Looking out across the wide flat land we saw that the whole world was slightly rounded, slightly tilted. It was like journeying over a large green apple. The globe in fact palpable, visibly rounded. Away on the left the sun was setting in straight streamers of pale red edged with shining gold. And the green common, with its pools of little red lilies, and its bands of pale yellow primroses, grew greyer and greyer.

Fuji San, perfect in long smooth curves, stood purple-blue behind. Clear-cut as a jewel in a setting he rose up, rose up, until the rounded strength of his summit lay bright sapphire on the azure sky.

Over the ruts the basha stumbled, endlessly jolting.

The sun set slowly, and slowly the colours died. Grey lay the common in front of us, on each side. Lord Fuji was but a dark, still shadow. And over the ruts the basha stumbled in long, slow jolts.

We were very tired, our backs ached with the jolting, and our arms were numb with pain. All around us the grey spaces of the common stretched uninterruptedly, without house or village. Where was Yoshida?

Still the basha lumbered and stumbled, and we looked for lights and houses.

Nothing. Only in front of us the grey level of the common grew tall and black.... In a few more jolts the deep black had engulfed us, grey common and all, and we were wandering among dark shadows that were trees.

In the very pitch of the blackness the cart suddenly stopped. We were asked to get out. The basha went no further.

“But Yoshida?”

“Yoshida yoroshī!—all right,” replied the man, unconcerned, as though every traveller to every town arrived in a dark wood without sight or sound of houses; and he drove off.

Our guide picked up the luggage, and we followed stumbling, straining our eyes to tell the deeper shadows that were trees from the paler dark that meant pathway.

Slowly the deeper shadows receded, and in their place came the dim forms of houses. Then a sharp turn and we were walking along a real road with the familiar knitting-needles of the Japanese tramway shining in the twilight. After a while the houses grew denser, and some of them had lights; but the contrast only made the pale dark of the open roadway seem still blacker.

Large trucks, like kitchen-tables with their legs cut short, came sliding past us as we stumbled on, gliding slowly down the road alone and unattached.

Parties of pilgrims in white, with white staves in their hands, came unexpectedly out of the darkness, and the lighted paper lanterns in their hands warmed their white clothes into a rich cream-yellow, precipitating them into solid bodies from the waist downward, while their heads and shoulders drifted slowly on through the pale night like impalpable ghosts.

We had reached the top of the hill, and the road, in a sudden turn, ran sharply away from us. The houses were on both sides now in one continuous line, and the shock of meeting trucks jarred through the street. There was a flare of orange light where the knitting-needles became a shunting-yard.

This was Yoshida.

Our landlady was aristocratic to her finger-tips. She had the long slim neck, the long thin face, with its pure outlines, the long narrow eyes, the long graceful body, and the delicate poise which is the ideal type of the aristocrat—and rare even among them. When she knelt on the matting to receive us, she did it with the distinction of a queen, and all her movements showed that clean-cut grace, that courtesy without effort, that refinement of pose and gesture which only the continued culture of long generations can produce, and which is to mere politeness or mere beauty as the subtle music of the poet to Monsieur Jourdain’s prose. Her husband was a bullet-headed man of the people, stubby and plebeian. His manners, like his Japanese, were polite of course, but undistinguished, while our hostess spoke a language as courtly as her ways. When she glided over the matting, her long sleeves swaying, or stretched out her thin slim-fingered hand to take our tea-cups, we felt like beings of a lower evolution, and this higher product, evolved by centuries of self-control and a living love of beauty, was the human form made perfect, to which we might, perhaps, one day attain.

Even the inn possessed something of her grace: the matting was whiter, the woodwork smoother, the steep stairway—set like a ladder between the walls—more polished than elsewhere. The tiny medallions set deep in the shōji, which are as the handles to our doors, were works of art. The miniature garden of the courtyard, with its hills and trees and swift grey stream, was a living landscape, perfect in form and colouring. Even the shallow brass pans in which we washed, the commonest of hotel furniture, had an elegance of their own. And in the refined and beautiful inn our graceful, courtly landlady knelt and offered us platefuls of “mixed biscuits.” They were certainly cheap ones, but never did the utter vulgarity of their shapes, or the crudeness of their colouring, strike so sharply on my senses. If they had tasted like manna from the wilderness I could not have eaten one. They were too ugly.

It is vivid still, the bliss of that hot bath in fresh mountain water pumped from a stream which comes from Fuji’s sacred slopes, and the joy of that long dreamless sleep under the green mosquito curtain in our white matted room. Vivid still, the breakfast cooked over the hibachi, with our aristocratic landlady, every line of her graceful form looking purer and more refined as she stooped to hold the handle of the frying-pan, while her stolid husband on his knees before his office desk in the corner looked on good-naturedly, and the stout little maid watched the foreign cooking of our ham as though it had been a sacred rite.

We were to return by the lakes which encircle Fuji, and we set out that morning along a dull dusty road between dull dusty banks.

It was but a little way to the first lake, but hot beyond believing, and when we reached it, and pushed out in our boat beyond the narrow inlet which ran deep into the road, the heat settled down like a roof above our heads.

The sky was one superb arch of azure blue; the earth in front of us a wide, bare flat, glittering with heat. And from out of that gleaming, quivering mist which hid the level land Great Fuji rose dark blue on blue. Naked and superb he stood against the background of the sky secure in his strength, perfect in his beauty, beyond words, beyond praise, in sober truth—divine.

It took an hour and a half to cross the lake, and all the time Fuji San, set in the framework of the turquoise sky, with the gleaming, glittering mist of light sweeping like an iridescent cloud to the edge of his dark blue slope, stayed with us. For an hour and a half we looked, and the form and the soul of the mountain sank deep within our hearts.

The second lake is divided from the first by a natural wall of hill over which we climbed, the sun striking fiercely on the pathway where one small patch of shade lay black on the thick white dust.

The second lake was set deep within the circle of the hills, and we crossed it in company with three men who had drunk much saké, and another who stuck fuses into a row of dynamite cartridges and then, leaving them under a corner of the matting in the bottom of the boat, apparently forgot their existence. These four passengers and the two boatmen were continually stumbling up and down the boat to row in turns, and always within a few inches of the dynamite.

It was a somewhat agitating row, although we were assured the cartridges were “only for fishing.”

It ended at last, after a long two hours of suspense, among the quiet grey boulders which stretched for a hundred yards between the water and the wood.

Down the little valley beyond the stones, a winding river of rice-fields ran like a grass-green stream, and we followed it, as one follows up a mountain brook, till it dwindled and disappeared. Then the wood closed in above it, and we were in the middle of a weird uncanny forest, all grey and wrinkled, where multitudes of thick-set pole-like trees, covered with a powdery dust, ranged ghost-like out of sight.

And here we walked, the only living things in a spell-bound world, walked until the earth grew thin beneath our feet and the rough grey boulders came up through the soil.

Then for a long, long while we went beside a grey lava-river flowing between the grey tree-stems, a wide and furious river arrested as it swept in angry tumult through the wood, stopped dead, and each breaking wave turned into stone. We looked at this still, dead river and saw how the years had covered the waves with a thick white crust of dust. Buried deep lay that tempest of passion which once had swept burning from Fuji’s sides, buried deep beneath blocks of grey lava and the drifting ash-grey dust.

Yet the very stones that buried it were carved in its image. And the face of that passion, petrified and deadly, looked up from the river. And all around the grey wood stood dead too, and very still, coated deep with a powdery dust, ash-grey. For the spell of the river was over the wood, and it was the death of Destruction.

For miles we walked beside that Medusa river, sometimes we left it, sometimes we crossed it, then losing it between the trees we wandered where the ghostly pole-like trunks grew thickest. But always the river came back with the dead passion that made it staring rigid beneath the stones.

Miles and miles of lava, wide, and long, and deep. The ghostly trees were rooted in it, the very lakes lay cradled in it, the world for far around was made of it. Verily the fires of Fuji San were mighty in those days.