Kakemono

We were to climb Asamayama. The plan seemed simple and delightful; to take horses in the cool of the evening and ride by moonlight to the last green frill of trees upon the mountain side: to climb the nine thousand feet to the very edge of the crater; and then in those blackest hours before the dawn to look into the volcano’s mysterious depths, all red and glowing, where flame and smoke strive ever for the mastery, where the long orange tongues leap up through rolling purple masses of the smoke; and all around and all below, as far as eye can pierce, is lurid glowing red. And still on the crater’s treacherous sides which hold smoke and flame unsteadily as a drunkard holds his cup, to look down fascinated until they crumble beneath one’s feet, and the thrill of terror bites in the memory of the mighty force indelible. Then to breakfast under the sheltering walls of the old crater; to watch the darkness melt before the coming day, to see the sun rise swiftly in his strength, and the long circle of the hills stand clear and blue and liquid on the upland plain; to see the giant ridges of the mountains stretching from sea to sea with the faint white cone of Fuji a dream upon the distant sky; to look in the freshness of the morning upon the beauty of the land, and standing on the cinder slopes of Asama to trace the tortured lava beds stretching like long grey snakes among the green till the trees grow over and the forest engulfs them. And still in the first hours of the dawn to ride back slowly with the memory of the crater and the sunrise making pictures in one’s mind, tired but contented.

The programme was delightful, perfect, it only remained to carry it out. So we started, on the sorry horses of the upland regions of Japan, and the full moon fitful behind thick clouds shone sadly. It was distinctly chilly, for the table land of Karuizawa is 3000 feet above sea level, and in the air was the damp shiver of coming rain. Still we started, out of the village and along the wide still plain where the dark shadow of a hill showed round as a basin on our right. This was Asama’s satellite, born of her fires, made of her ashes, a round, smooth, green hill, cruelly deceitful.

The empty plain stretched dark to the edge of the misty clouds and diffused through it was a pale grey light that shimmered, trembling. Over the plain and the mountain, through the air and the shadows, the light filtered mistily, swaying and rounding the outlines till they looked like solid bodies seen through a vast perspective of clear water. As we plodded on, the paper lanterns held by each boy at the horses’ heads turned all the wet black path to shining silver pools which gleamed as the light fell on them, quivered like spreading veins of ore, and disappeared into the blackness. The limpid flowing air that swayed above the plain, all luminous and clear, grew darker, shrank as it were together, lost its liquid light, turned slowly into rain, and came down steadily.

We passed through a second village, and went on, over a rutty road, between high banks, persistently upwards. All the sounds of the world had died away, and the life of the woods, the rustle of leaves and of grasses, the long thick hum of the insects was dead. Nothing moved. Even the rain made no sound as it fell in great wet clouds upon the ground.

High up on the rutty road we halted, while the two boys plunging downward through the bushes in the darkness drank of a silent stream which flowed below, the last water we should pass that night. The leaves of the bushes cut sharp green silhouettes upon the blackness, stiff and metallic as tinfoil, as the boys, lantern in hand, plunged downward. But we did not go, for the soft cloud of rain was falling thicker, wetter, and we were cold. When each had drunk his fill, and the metal green leaves of the bushes had flashed back into darkness again, we plodded on, over the common, under the trees, along another piece of road, looser, more rutty than the last, and definitely among the dripping trees we climbed upward.

The moon was gone now, hidden deep behind the falling layers of cloud. And there was a hush, a stagnancy upon all things as though an unseen, unknown force were terrorising life to stillness. Not a tree had leave to stir. The branches huddled dumbly, and all the seething insect life which makes the woods so full of sound lay stricken, lay dumb, paralysed; and among the damp trees we journeyed on.

At midnight the horses stopped, in a fold of the hills on the edge of the trees, where the blackness lay solid, and we slid down. One boy tied the horses together and sat down patiently to await our return next morning. The other snuffed the candle in his paper lantern and prepared to lead the way. By this time it was raining hard, in distinct material drops, which splashed sharply on face and hands, and it was pitch dark. The boy, lantern in hand, went first, and all the light of the lantern so carefully trimmed was cut off from us by his stout round body. We knew by the crunch there were cinders under foot, by the cold wet dabs that ghost-like pressed our hands that there were bushes, and that we climbed.

From time to time the boy would sway his lantern to one side or the other, and stunted shrubs like London laurel trees would start into being, and disappear. With each swing of the lantern the stunted shrubs grew scarcer and more stunted, till they dwindled to bushes, to mere green weeds like dandelions, to nothingness. Then the light fell on cinder, piled up, half-burnt cinder with ends of broken brickbats, and all the rubbish of a dust-heap. And at each step the wind came up and up; colder, stronger, wetter it tore down the bare steep slopes driving us backwards. Then we would sit down upon the cinders, our backs to the mountain, our feet on the brickbats, and pant. It was distinctly exhausting. Each footstep was a launch into the unknown, and a searching for a foothold, each pause an adding to the weight of cinders that drifted down boots and clothing. And it rained with fierce splashes when the wind blew, with dull persistency when it died away, but still unceasingly. And that sense of an unseen, unknown force, paralysing all things, grew with each footstep. The chill of a dumb terror lay upon the world, and the utter desolation struck colder than the wind.

We rested again while the icy wind rushed screeching through the cinders; and, as it died away, the chirp of a Japanese grasshopper came into the stillness. We were far above the weeds now, in the region of perpetual cinder, and still that grasshopper chirped weakly. But the spell was too real, the terror too deathly; the unseen, unknown force took a step nearer in the darkness, and the weak wee chirp seemed only the voice of the horror, the breath of the dumbness giving it life.

The cinders grew looser and looser as we climbed, more difficult to tread, and the stagnant silence was filled and filled with sulphur. It did not come in breaths or gusts, or driving before the wind, it was there in the silence, part of it, and it wrapped us round. If dead silence can grow more deathly, then did that stillness die again. The dumb terror tightened on the world, and the unknown force came nearer.

From far below the sound of pouring heavy stones drove up and up. The mountain rumbled in its depths, rumbled and was still. The presence of that unseen force was manifest. Before it terror crouched still as a bird beneath the swooping shadow of the hawk.

We climbed up heavily, up through the thick sulphur and the loose steep cinders, up till we turned, and the full force of the wind came sweeping round the side of the mountain. We were walking on the edge, the real edge over which you could fall, and it was all of lava, sticky as clay and crossed with deep black cracks that had no bottom. The wind swept down here undisturbed, the gusts of rain broke sharply on the paper lantern as it swayed from side to side to peer out a way. The sticky lava softened rapidly until it sucked around our feet, drawing them down. Then a long fierce gust blew out the lantern and we stood still.

“Honourably please stand very still,” called the boy quickly.

And we stayed dead still.

The gust of wind rushed by us, rushed on. Then another blew till we cowered on the sinking lava. It was so long in passing that the moments seemed as hours. We stood like statues. Insidiously the lava crept above our feet, crept stealthily, and motionless we waited.

The gust died down but the wind still blew, still blew. A light quivered for a moment in the darkness and went out. The boy had lit a match. He struck another. It flickered in little yellow leaps that showed the lantern and his face and went abruptly out. Again the tiny mandorla of light shot up, the boy was holding the lantern in his hand all ready. We could see the flame double as the candle caught, then both went swiftly out, for again the wind came rushing down. It blew and blew. Then it blew so fiercely that to blow again it stopped to take its breath. Quickly in the second’s pause the match flared up, the lantern lit, and we could move.

As we drew out our feet the wicked sticking lava sucked, and the boy held the lantern low to peer out the cracks. Then he turned sharply to the left, and the wind was gone.

We stood in a narrow roofless cave whose sides were overhanging rock, whose floor was lava ash, wet with big rain pools. This was the old crater. Asama has three craters, and two are at present in disuse. We were sheltering in one of these. It was a still haven of refuge after the fury of the wind outside, and a sure. There were no cracks, no sticky sucking lava here. With relief as from a heavy burden we sat down upon the wet ash to rest and eat, the lantern in our midst.

It was now 3 o’clock. Since midnight we had been climbing, our clothes were soaked and heavy with rain and cinders, and we were very tired. The boy prosaically unpacked the hamper, and by the flickering light he set out plates and food. But before we could take one mouthful, the wind rushed down the roofless cave, upset the hamper, swept the lantern along the ash before it, tore like a whirlwind from end to end, and left us in an unearthly livid darkness that lighted nothing.

For a moment we all stayed numbed, then the boy sought the remnants of his lantern and we the remnants of our meal. They were both embedded in thick lava dust.

We could not go on up the crater now, for every minute the wind blew fiercer, and the paper lantern was torn in several places. We must wait for the dawn to show us the way. So we huddled under the shelter of the overhanging rock and waited.

The livid darkness that lay upon the mountain grew more livid and less dark to our watching eyes, till we could distinguish the faint outlines of things, though not the things themselves. It was, oh! so cold, and that sense of stagnant terror, dispersed for a little by the wind and the food, crept back and back, intenser, dumber than before.

Then the mountain rumbled in its depths, and the sound of pouring heavy stones came up again. This time it did not die away, it stopped abruptly, as though by force of will. And we waited.

It was so cold that I could sit still no longer, and, wrapping my cloak around me, tired as I was, walked up and down, up and down.

The overhanging rocks, whose outlines showed so ghostly against the livid darkness, rose high above our heads. From time to time the sulphur thickened in the air, making us cough.

And the deathness of that silence, the dumb horror of that stillness spread and spread and spread. It was all afraid.

The boy, curled under his rock, slept peacefully. We walked and waited.

Then, in an instant, two great tongues of flame shot into the darkness, leapt high toward the sky, and two reports, as of the heaviest thunder, shook the mountain. The boy, awakened, jumped up quickly, looked at the flames as they sprang into the darkness, and the thunder of the second report shook the ground beneath his feet, turned to speak, when a sudden sharp clatter came like a hiss past all our ears, calling “Stones, stones,” he threw himself flat on his face and rolled right under the rock.

We, too, rushed to the overhanging rocks and crouched down quickly, and the sharp clatter of stone on stone went on all around us.

Asama had rumbled to some purpose, and she was resting.

Then the utter silence, the dead, dumb horror came back, came back again. Fear breathed beside us in the darkness.

Slowly the little stars above the rocks dropped out of the sky, the livid darkness changed to livid light, and it was dawn, a cold, grey dawn, but little lighter than the night had been. Still we could see, see the lava and the ash, so, rolling out from under our rock, we shook ourselves together, chattering with cold.

The ground at our feet was sprinkled with pinky-grey stones, daubed with bright yellow sulphur, and glowing hot. They were as large as a clenched fist, with edges sharp and jagged. We stooped to pick up one—the least hot—and carry it wrapt in handkerchiefs, which it burnt, and mackintoshes which it singed, back to Karuizawa.

The boy looked at the stones, looked at us, looked towards the crater, and asked with many warnings if we were to go on. We, too, looked at the stones, and thoughtfully towards the crater, and, as we looked, the mountain rumbled slowly in its depths.

Seizing the basket, the boy fled, our one and only guide. We followed him, over the cracks and the spongy soft lava, too occupied with wondering how we had ever passed over it safely the night before to be afraid now—too busy, too, watching the boy fleeing in front of us, too occupied marking his path to think even of eruptions. And somehow we got over safely, back on to the solid cinder slope of Asama again, the slope that went down straight as a shoot, and fell away as abruptly on each side as a bridge. It was ground, and after the cracks and the sucking lava, solid, though the cinders did shift beneath our feet. We had leisure to look round us, and found the mountain wrapped in a thick white mist. By this time the boy had disappeared entirely, but we did not trouble now. There seemed no choice of paths down. Our cinder bridge went on, sloping steeply downwards into the hidden world below, and we followed it.

A little way below, the mist sank suddenly beneath our feet, and we were walking in the yellow sunlight—walking down a cinder slope that shone jet-black against a pale blue sky, while all around and all beneath, and surging up against the cinder slope, floated a wild wide sea of dead white clouds—a dead, still sea, with its waves stiffened into frozen snow. Tossing, it lay beneath the clear blue sky, and the pale sun glinted on its snow-white crests, glinted on the still gigantic billows that stretched from cinder pathway to the far blue sky. It lay a silent sea of milk-white frozen waves that was such stuff as dreams are made of.

And we went on, down. As the gods of old along a sloping bridge that crossed the clouds and stretched from the blue heaven to the hidden earth beneath, like Izanagi and Izanami, as they crossed the rainbow bridge from the High Plain of Heaven and stirred the floating brine with their jewelled spear—stirred till it went “koro, koro”—till it went “curdle, curdle,” as the old chronicle says, and the drops that dripping fell from the celestial spear piled up into the firstborn of the islands of Japan.

A sudden peal of echoing thunder shook our cinder bridge, and we turned abruptly. Somewhere on the other side of the topmost edge of cinder rose up a huge column of thick smoke. The wickedest dead-white smoke, which, slowly curling over at the tips like ostrich feathers, showed shadows of deep mauve and dull blue-purple, while from below the heavy pouring of great stones drove up and up. Asama rumbled, rumbled in her depths. Half an hour sooner we should have been up there still. Had we gone on to the crater we should have been on the very edge. The memory of the sharp-edged clattering stones, red-hot and big as fists, came back to us. We looked at one another silently, and went on, downwards.

Slowly the gigantic plumes of thick curdled smoke drifted up into the blue, and they were very beautiful. It was as though Asama wore a sweeping white panache in her coal-black helmet. But the thundering roar of the eruption had torn our sea of frozen snow, to pieces. The blank white mist shut swiftly down, and hid the mountain and the smoke, the cinders and the sky; only the wide black bridge was left sloping straight downwards.

We reached our horses drenched, to sit on high-peaked saddles and journey back through dank dripping trees, over rutty roads, across thick green commons heavy with mist, back cold, wet and hungry to Karuizawa again.

But we kept our stone, and though we had not seen into the crater, we had perhaps come nearer to that mysterious force, itself unseen, unknown, which dwells beneath the lava and the ash, and terrorises life.