Chapter III: Part 3

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.

* * * * *

The third lake was black, ink-black, black as strong-cast shadows in the moonlight. Tarnished and still it lay, without a glitter or a gleam; yet the washing wavelets, as they poured over the stone at our feet, were pure and clear, and the high steep hills that half encircled it were dense with the greenest trees.

The ghostly wood was ended, the petrified river gone; on the banks of this sombre lake living trees were growing. Tangled and thick and high, they walled in three sides of the lake, and, sweeping round in a long thin promontory, divided the ink-black waters with a sword of green.

Along the hill there ran no pathway, the trees stood too thick, the hill too steep. There was no boat upon the lake nor any road around it. The black waters washed to the foot of the trees, the trees stretched green to the top of the hills, and lake and wood were still as undiscovered country.

And behind us lay all the long silence of the ghostly wood.

On the very edge of the promontory a white house rested, poised like a gull on the water, but the dead-black lake gave back no reflection, and the dark-green hills caught no colour from the sun, nor stirred a leaf. Silent as the waters the house poised white beneath the evening sky.

On three sides the high hills shut in the lake, but on the fourth the lava-stones met the marsh, the marsh the common, and wide and flat the common stretched away to the beyond.

A little while and the setting sun was down behind the hills, and all the sky was darkening into night. Far over the common, and purple as a king’s raiment, rose Fuji San. Grand and lonely he stood between dark earth and darkening sky; far off on the edge of the world, and all the solemn stillness of the evening wrapt him round.

Gently fell the twilight on lake and hill. The grey spaces of the common stretched more vast and wide. The night was coming fast.

Beneath my feet the blackness of the waters opened as the deep abyss. Behind, the horror of the spell-bound wood waited wide-eyed. Sweeping onwards in the twilight the indistinctness of the common passed out of sight, the pathless hills closed round me.

Then the spell of the ghostly wood reached out to clutch. I looked towards the light.... Dim as Life’s hope it lay, far off beyond the horizon, while all the blackness of the lake and hill surrounded me.

I strained my eyes across the indistinctness, and from that far-off heaven a lofty Presence leaned.

It was the Great God Fuji.

III

EPILOGUE

The blue sea lies sleeping warm and still; the sky, another sea, sleeps too; only the green headlands standing between blue and blue watch, their feet in the water. And the heat is the heat of a summer’s noon.

So still the sea, so quiet the sky, so calm the earth that the soft breath of the sleeping ocean comes as a rippling sigh towards the land, while the blue sea above floats lazy.

From their low hill Tesshuji’s forsaken Gods look out. The temple walls are bare, its altars dumb, and the grass-grown court has shod even silence with a velvet shoe. Dreaming, the Gods sit undisturbed, and the hush of the noonday’s heat is deepened.

It is long since the clang of the praying-bell overhead called them to listen. Still they sit, and look.

In the shadow of the doorway at the still Gods’ feet, I, too, sit and look.

Over the sleeping sea, blue and still, beyond the watching headlands, out into the liquid sky above, where in utter majesty great Fuji rises one sheer line of beauty in the blue. The rounded curve of his snow-crest shimmers white as a sun-caught sail, and the long slope of his perfect form is a deep blue line on blue. Fuji rises as a tower, he floats in that limpid sea above a mist-clad iceberg. And the glimmer of his snow-crest is a shining crown of glory in the sky. So real, so simple, so beautiful. Just a crescent of white snow floating thirteen thousand feet above the world, and two long lines of blue sloping gently downwards, outwards to the earth. So simple, so beautiful, is it real?

A faint stir in the sleeping sea and I drop my eyes to the blue below.

Beauty, said the Greeks, was born of the waves and the foam. Once in that clear sea above, a great blue wave came leaping with a crest of foam. It was Beauty’s self, all-perfect, and they called it Fujiyama. Beauty content to be but beauty.

* * * * *

Tesshuji’s Gods look out over the sea, beyond the green headlands into the blue. They dream undisturbed. They have looked so long.

The noonday heat has spread the land with a quivering haze of blue. It sleeps. The softly breathing sea sleeps too. No prayer has roused the Gods, they too are sleeping.

The whole world, says the Scriptures, is but a dream of the great Lord Buddha. Tesshuji’s Gods are dreaming, and Fuji is.

Dream Gods for ever.

THE ART OF THE NATION

“All that is superfluous is displeasing to God and Nature;
all that is displeasing to God and Nature is bad.”
DANTE, “De Monarchia,” bk. i. chap. xiv.

I

GRACE BEFORE MEAT

The _kuruma_ running quickly through the narrow opening in the high bamboo fence curved into a tiny garden set with dark green shrubs, and stopped abruptly.

In front of us, where a square recess broke the long line of wooden wall, a pile of _gheta_ lay heaped on a grey stone block. At the sound of our coming the wooden wall opened, and a Japanese in _kimono_ and _hakama_ stood bowing before us. He came with pairs of soft woolly night-socks to cover English feet, and, sitting down on the narrow knee-high platform of polished black wood, we took off our boots. Two giant curb-stones at right angles made a solitary step to reach the platform, and leaving our leather boots, looking caricatures of feet among the wooden sandals, we followed the waiting _kimono_ along the three-foot-wide platform.

Round the corner of the square recess, and shut off from the tiny courtyard by a thick screen of fence and shrubs, was a white garden, sunny and still, where, under a pale blue sky, the tall shadows of the trees fell black across the pure white snow. Sliding back the paper-paned wall the waiting _kimono_ bowed us to enter.

“Come in, come in,” said our friend the professor, his familiar face looking strangely unfamiliar from out the wide-sleeved silken _kimono_ and pleated silken skirts of his _hakama_, as he laughingly bowed us a Japanese welcome.

The first sensation on coming into that low matted room, bare of all furniture, was one of intense awkwardness, all one’s limbs seemed to have swollen to ungainly proportions, and to have grown correspondingly wooden and jerky. In a flash I had slipped back to a child’s years, and was lying in my little iron bedstead in the dark, the haunting terror of the unknown upon me, as I stealthily pinched a mountainous leg with a hand twelve feet thick, and trembled to feel the bedstead giving way beneath me. That old sensation of unaccountable largeness, of bursting one’s surroundings, stayed as the unreal background to my mind until the paper-paned walls closed behind me again.

“If you would like a chair, there are just two--” began the professor.

But we had come to be really Japanese, and Japanese we intended to remain at all costs. So, getting gingerly down on our knees on the square cushions that lay on the matted floor, we tried unsuccessfully to sit on our heels with the same grace as little Miss Hayashi opposite. There she sat, demure, serene, and, above all, supremely graceful all through lunch, while we, like chestnuts on hot bricks, hopped from knee to knee, bobbed up and down, tucked our legs under us like Turks, or bunchwise like children, leaned on one arm, then on the other, enduring untold horrors of pins and needles as we became more intimately acquainted with our own anatomy than we had ever done in all the previous years of our existence. And my admiration of Miss Hayashi grew as she sat there, one line of pure grace from the curves of her slender neck, rising from the folds of mauve and white, to the thick wadded hem of her _kimono_.

As I looked I grew more and more conscious that the dress and the room were one, each the necessary complement of the other, the right frame for the right picture, and the right picture in the right frame.

“The soul of Japan,” they say, “is the sword of the _samurai_.” “Then the soul of the _uchi_,” I thought, “is the _kimono_ of the housewife.”

The simplicity of the straight-falling lines, the perfection of the embroidery on the innermost of the folds around the neck, the richness of the _obi_ at the waist, there was the same severity of design with richness of decoration which characterised the room, where two paper-paned walls, one of sliding wood and the fourth stained a subdued brown, enclosed the bare matted space. Against the one solid wall was built a slightly raised platform of polished black wood, forming with the two low pillars of wood a wide recess, the _tokonoma_. Within the _tokonoma_ hung a long silken scroll where pale storks flew across the moon, a _kakemono_ of price. On the black wood of the platform, which was raised but a few inches from the ground, were set the two swords of the _samurai_, a bronze horse of exquisite workmanship, and in the corner some long branches of white plum-blossom in a vase. In these four objects (as in the _obi_ and the embroidery of the neck-folds) lay the entire decoration of the room. And looking, one realised that great truth, almost unknown to us, but a truism in Japan--the artistic value of space. In a European drawing-room you often cannot see one ornament for its fellows: here the bronze horse and the _kakemono_ held the eyes; one looked, and one _saw_; their beauty filled the soul; next week, next month, they will go back to the store-house, and others will take their place. I could never forget the curved lines of those two swords against the polished black floor under the white fragrance of the plum-blossoms, any more than I could forget the soft half-moon curves of Miss Hayashi’s _kimono_, white below mauve, as she glided over the matted floor.

Our lunch, we had come to lunch, opened with tea, pale amber tea in little round bowls on bronze stands, and sugar chrysanthemums, rice-paste storks and dolphins, cakes and sweets as perfect in design and colouring as though they were intended to last for ever. A rosy-cheeked maid, who bumped her head so vigorously on the floor that I thought she must get a headache, presented the tea, a bump for each guest and three as a salutation, while Miss Hayashi, folding squares of white paper in double triangles with one sweep of her hand, delicately heaped them full of sugar flowers and fishes, and passed them round, one to each of us.

Then came a long pause, while we asked all the questions that occurred to us about _kimono_ and _hakama_, and swords and etiquette; and then our lunch, a whole lacquered trayful of bowls for each one of us, with all the courses served together, and all irretrievably and, to us, inexplicably mixed. I pass the hot soup in a lacquered bowl, and the hot rice in a china one, but the rest--a golden bream on a pale blue plate set round with oranges in jelly; slices of pink raw fish, and a design in brown seaweed and green roots; a deep bowl of pale yellow custard, its surface ruffled with silver fishes, oriental whitebait, and its depths filled with bamboo shoots and lily bulbs and other surprises; and one dish, a triumph of design and colour, where an oval slab of pounded fish, white as snow, rested against a green mound of preserved chestnuts, while in front, arranged in a curving crescent like the tail of a comet, were purple roots, brown ginger, and slices of a red radish. And all this you eat as you please, a bit here, and a bit there, now a drink of salt soup, then a mouthful of sweet chestnut; custard, vegetables, fish, sweets, with relays of rice for bread, and _saké_ for wine, paper napkins, and withal two penholders to eat with, and your Japanese dinner is complete.