Chapter II: Part 2

It is the end of September, and wide through the land the rustle of ripening rice-ears comes and goes. Haneda-no-Inari, the Rice-God, is calling the peasants to his shrine. And they come; broad-shouldered, bullet-headed men, in short, blue tunics and dark blue hose, with brown weather-beaten faces, seamed and lined; and always their hard hands, half shut, half open, as though still holding hoe or plough. Old most of them, and with that half-deaf look which years of fieldwork brings. Intelligences half shut too, shutting fast on the primary ideas of life, on the traditions of their fathers; for a thought, like the hoe or plough, is too precious a thing to be lightly laid aside; it is bequeathed from generation to generation as are the rice-fields beneath their feet.

Inari calls, and the peasants come. Not only for the sake of the Rice-God, though the rustle of the ripening rice-ears is a music in the land, but because the image of the fox has dwelt so long in the Rice-God’s temple that to the peasant Inari is both Fox-and Rice-God. And the fear of the _Kitsuné_ is a power in Japan. The _Kitsuné_, who can take a woman’s shape and bewitch you; the _Kitsuné_, who can beguile a man that he follow to the fox’s very hole and stay there living on snails and worms. The _Kitsuné_, who, entering a man’s body under his finger-nails, will possess it, so that he howls like a fox, slowly changes into one, and dies. And so they come to the temple, up from the rice-fields, up under the scarlet tunnels of the _torī_, for the passing through each tunnel means a wish fulfilled.

The gateways indeed have swallowed up this shrine. There is no temple, only a low matted booth; at the back two white china images of the Fox-God, his tail curled high above his head, and a priest on the matting, as a shopman at his stall, selling charms, multitudes of miniature china foxes, words on rice-paper, and mounds of earth, a whole shopful of charms and amulets.

Opposite is a row of rabbit burrows, each roofed with a shelving stone; just a hole in the ground, but full of meaning to the peasant, for it is the home of the _Kitsuné_, and he crouches on the ground in front of it, his head between his knees, or thrust far into the big burrow in the eagerness of his prayer. And his face works; the priest behind him watches. _Kitsuné_ is a reality to him, a force strong as Nature’s laws, but capricious; so he prays. Then half in fear, half in reverence, he thrusts one arm as far as it will go into the hole, and scraping softly brings back a handful of brown earth. His face lights up, and the priest behind leans forward.

Still on his knees the peasant wraps the magic earth in layers of clean rice-paper and puts it carefully away in the breast of his patched tunic. Then he gets up. He has his charm, a remedy against sickness and disaster, a charm for his rice-fields and himself. The priest behind reaches out his hand. He makes a keen shopkeeper, and his celestial wares are never stolen. The temple terms are “cash down, and prayers not taken in exchange.”

Through the long scarlet tunnels of the _torī_, back to the ripening rice-fields the peasants go. The green point lies a henna-stained finger in the lap of the ocean. Haneda-no-Inari, the temple of the superstitious, glows a living tip of red.

For its sins are as scarlet.

XIII

THE ALTAR OF FIRE

It all happened in a suburban temple in the town of Tokyo, at the time of the blossoming cherry-trees; and the prosaic din of a modern city full of trains and tramcars hemmed us round. We had been conscious of it dimly throughout the long ceremonial within the temple, where Shintō priests in brocaded robes chanted in twos and threes, in solo and in chorus; where the old High Priest had blessed with long strange rites the four elements, earth, which is the mother of all things, fire, water, air; had blessed the rice by which the people live, salt, and _saké_; but now that we were all assembled in the outer courtyard the noise of a busy city came distinctly to the ear. Tokyo was working hard this April afternoon, and the cries of the newspaper boys pierced up shrilly from the street below.

In the courtyard the ancient vestments of the priests showed strangely beside the modern frocks of American visitors, the tweed suits of a party of Cook’s tourists, even beside the _kimono_ of the Japanese crowd, so markedly Tokyo and _Meiji_ (age of enlightenment), in their felt hats, cloth caps, and “bowlers.”

The courtyard was big, the native crowd railed in at one end left a large space bare, and here in the centre of the stamped brown earth a great pile of burning charcoal was heaped. Twenty feet long, and nearly as many broad, it glowed a solid mass of quivering heat, while priests at each corner stood fanning the sullen red to an ever fiercer flame. It was not hot enough yet, and in the sunshine of that April afternoon we waited.

At the further end of the courtyard a broad band of salt lay on the brown earth like a white step to the altar. The great fans of the fanning priests sent puffs of heat across the court that made the distinguished guests shrink back. And yet the glowing charcoal pyre was not hot enough.

Behind us, in a corner of the courtyard, stood a bamboo ladder, whose every rung was made of the razor-blade of a Japanese sword, set edge upwards. As we all stood waiting, watching the solid altar of red flame grow redder, a young man came out of the temple and crossed the court. He was dressed in the short white tunic of religious festivals, and his legs and feet were bare. He bowed to the party of distinguished guests, to the priests, to the old High Priest, and from his manner I judged him not a priest, but a temple attendant.

Among the crowd there was a murmur, a sway of intense excitement, and then a dead stillness. In the stillness the young man put his bare foot upon the lowest rung of the ladder, and an involuntary shudder went through us all. A large-checked tourist, pushing every one aside, rushed up to the ladder, and felt a sword-rung with his hand. Then he came back, and across his open palm a ruled red line of blood rose up swiftly.

There was a whispering among the priests, a commotion in the crowd, but the polite expressions of regret from the old High Priest were courtly with honorifics. The large-checked tourist tied his hand up clumsily in his own pocket-handkerchief, and looked annoyed. The fanning priests, with rhythmic movements of their hands and bodies, chased the living heat across the court, and did not pause.

Again there was a murmur in the crowd, a stretching of necks to see, and a dead silence.

The white-tuniced attendant, who had stood quite still beside the ladder, placed his bare foot upon the lowest rung, and I saw the large-checked tourist wince as though his injured hand were there instead. Lightly as a sailor climbs, the young man ran up the ladder rung by rung, and neither hands nor feet grew red. On the top he stayed, looking down, and a shudder like a cry of pain went through the courtyard. Then he turned, hanging for one brief moment by his knees on the topmost rung--turned, and came down again.

In the April sunshine the sword-blades, from top to bottom of the ladder, glittered spotless.

Firmly on his bare, brown feet the young man walked across the court, bowed to the party of distinguished visitors, to the priests, to the old High Priest, and disappeared within the temple.

The crowd behind the railings exclaimed in admiration, but the distinguished visitors were above surprise. The party of Cook’s tourists who had just “done” India were full of explanations. It was “mere jugglery,” they said, though each man differed in his theory. One was eloquent on hypnotic suggestion, and though the damaged tourist, his hand still bound up, “couldn’t go so far as that, sir,” was not to be persuaded. The injured tourist had apparently only been hypnotised a little more effectually than the rest of us. The American guests favoured “acrobatic training from infancy,” which “made the bones just like jelly.” Somebody said he had heard it was “done with oil,” but was quite vague as to the how, and all the more insistent in consequence. And so we explained and argued while the level rays of sunshine fell on the spotless sword-rungs of the ladder, and on the vestments of the Shintō priests. They had watched and were impassive. The climbing of the ladder was not a sacred ceremony, not a rite, rather an amusement allowed the multitude, as the Catholic Church offered _jongleries_ in the Middle Ages.

But as the sun fell lower and lower in the April sky, a hush came among the little group of priests, and growing, travelled slowly over the courtyard. Even the damaged tourist stopped his explanations. The great red altar of heat that lay a fallen pillar of fire across the courtyard was glowing now white-hot with life. The fanning priests at each corner had moved further back to escape the scorch of the flames, but still they fanned. In waves and gusts the heat was borne across the court, to flicker, as it were, upon the air, steady itself and then drive solidly forward. The Cook’s tourists who had seized upon the front row of seats, twisted uneasily on their chairs, unwilling to give up their “best places,” unable to endure the burning. But the fierce scorch of the heat came steadily onwards, and before it the tourists ran, dragging their chairs after them.

Still the fanning priests fanned on, chasing the quivering flames on the red altar of heat, till it pulsed with a white-hot breath like a thing alive.

In the pale April sky the swift sun was dropping golden through the last arcs of heaven to a grey band of clouds upon the horizon. In half an hour it would be night.

There was a stir in the crowd beyond the barriers; the fanning priests beat out their rhythm slowly, and with the shadows the gathering sense of awe deepened. Only the altar of heat burned brighter, gathering to itself all the colour from the world.

Apart from the crowd the High Priest stood, the gold on his vestment gleaming, and he watched the sun. The peace upon his face was like an unsaid prayer. Did his soul go out to _Amaterasu_, the great Sun-Goddess?

Swiftly the sun dropped through the bank of clouds leaving them golden, showed a red circle on the horizon, and passed beneath. The faintest flicker of emotion stirred for a moment the grave reverence of the old man’s face. Then he turned. The rhythmic beating of the fanning priests died into silence. The red altar stood a burning fiery furnace in the courtyard, where already twilight was. He spoke no word, but the religious calm of a perfect trust was in all his being. It touched the straining multitude behind the barriers, even the tourists in their chairs. Breathless we stayed gripped by the powers of an awed suspense, of a great belief, as he came on. There was no hurry, no tremor in his movements, on through the hot scorched air he came, on, over the threshold of strewn salt, and on, over the altar of heat. With naked feet he trod from end to end the white-hot pathway, and the burning charcoal snapped beneath his tread. With naked feet he walked, unscathed, over that fiery furnace; and the breath of a passionate prayer passed like a sob through the courtyard.

Then one by one the priests in their embroidered vestments stepped from the threshold of salt on to the fire. From end to end of the altar they too trod that white-hot pathway slowly, unhurt, and the living charcoal glowed like a thousand suns in the twilight.

Slowly behind their distant barriers the crowd stirred irresolute. An old man whose face showed rapt in the circle of firelight approached the priests. Hesitating he was led up to the altar, over the white salt step, and faltering, he too trod the white-hot pathway. Then a coolie came through the shadows, he too stepped up to the altar, passed over the threshold of salt on to the living charcoal.

In twos and threes the crowd was coming now. Some of them hesitated on the white salt step, some hurried along the fiery pathway. A few, a very few, walked away as though their feet were singed. But all came, even the children. The big children who went resolutely alone, the little children whom the priests led.

And the twilight in the courtyard deepened into night. The broad altar of heat glowed ruddy, a deep sun-red as its life pulsed slower. The tourists were all quiet on their chairs, not one of them would venture, though the little children went before. The Faith was not in them, nor the power of that great Belief. But those behind the barriers, this Tokyo crowd in _kimono_ and “bowler,” they believed. With the sounds of a modern city humming in their ears, fresh from the western education of their Board Schools, they, as their forefathers for two thousand years, passed over the fire. This burning symbol of a spiritual purification had meaning for them. They _had faith and were not afraid_.

Unto such is the Dominion of the Earth; unto such is the Kingdom of Heaven.

XIV

FORGOTTEN GODS

Neglected by the river side the Buddhas sit, in one long silent row. The rain is beating on their unprotected heads, and down their granite faces little rills of water trickle. The river at their feet runs swift and strong, grey among the boulders, as it rushes down to Nikkō. And they sit forsaken.

The moss is thick upon their shoulders, the granite faces are all scarred and battered, blotched with pallid growths, spotted with dusty accumulations. But the Buddhas smile. Beneath their heavy-lidded eyes they smile, a slow, still, changeless smile.

On the green bank above the tumultuous river there is no shrine, no priest; the forgotten gods sit still, in one long silent row, and the rain beats down relentless. Over their battered heads it runs, and down their moss-grown shoulders; the soiled stone laps are full of it, and it stands in ever widening pools about the lotus-leaves of each pedestal. For in Nikkō the rain, tropical in vehemence, is persistent, as in the Outer Hebrides. It lies to-day in slanting lines, thick as willow-switches, across the dull grey sky.

I could not well be wetter, so I stop to look, and the whole long silent row of Gods Forgotten smiles gently back at me.

Remindful of the legend which calls them numberless, I try to count. Once, twice, several times; but the legend is right. Each time my total varies. Perhaps the rain confuses me; the willow-switches lie so thick across the sky. So I give it up and look at the long desolate row of the numberless Buddhas. I wonder if they envy the Buddha who fell from his pedestal into the stream and was carried down to Imaichi, where the villagers, finding him uninjured, reverently set him up with his face towards Nikkō. Now the country-side adores him, and he wears a large pink bib.

Across the madly rushing river, churned grey between the boulders, the Buddhas smile.... It is a smile of understanding. Yes, the slow, still smile of One Who Understands, who understands All Things, and understanding, is content.

And who should understand, and understanding rest content, if not the Eternal Buddha? Is not the Godhead wise? Does it not see the meaning and the path of All Things? And seeing, were it not then content the Devil triumphs?

“God’s in His Heaven,
All’s right with the world.”

If God be in His Heaven, and God be God, then must the Godhead understanding smile.

* * * * *

Through the thick-falling rain the long still row of granite Buddhas smile back at me. I have thought so long upon that smile, which strikes on western senses oddly, almost irreverently. Do we ever conceive of a smiling God? In all the long picture galleries of Europe I have never seen a Christ who smiled. With sword-pierced side and thorn-crowned head He hangs before us--suffering, always sad. The Man of Sorrows; yet He redeemed the world; He saved mankind. For pure joy a soul could smile at such a thought. Yet with us the Redeemer suffers; He never smiles.

The peasant Sōgorō, from his cross where he had watched the killing of his children, laughed gaily as he bade his dying wife farewell; for he had saved three hundred villages from unjust taxation. In his intensest suffering a Japanese is taught to smile. He comes to tell you that his child is dying, and he smiles. Perhaps his eyes are red, but he smiles, that the sight of his suffering may not pain another. It is the sublimest unselfishness and self-control. Sōgorō dying on the cross bade his crucified wife farewell, laughing gaily, and no Japanese would praise or wonder at the fact. Sōgorō died as a martyr. Yes, I have seen a smile on the faces of our martyrs, rarely, it is true. Sodoma’s _St. Sebastian_ smiles; it is a smile of the eyes. He sees a vision--the Lamb of God and all the choirs of the angels. But Christ never smiles. I cannot think of one picture, one conception of a smiling God. Sad, weighed down with the sins of mankind; pitiful, pleading; or stern, implacable, the Just Judge, the Ruler of the Universe, immovable Omnipotence, scales in hand. Can either Godhead smile?

Buddha suffered much and endured much, but still he smiles. He too is merciful and full of pity. He too suffers with each sin man sins. Here too the Just Judge judgeth the World. And the patient Buddha suffers till the wicked are redeemed. There is no end to his suffering till all are saved. Only when the wicked cease from troubling, cease because they are the good, is mortal life completed, till then the complex worlds spin on and on. Yet Buddha smiles. For man’s birthright is not sin, not sorrow, but Joy. The Godhead smiles.

This long silent row of granite gods, fashioned by the hands and the hearts of this nation, smile. And all the bronze and granite statues, all the gilded images, all the Buddhas of this island smile too, for the people who made them and conceived them believe in Joy, in the innate as in the ultimate goodness of man; in the innate as in the ultimate Joy of the Godhead. Verily these are forgotten Gods in western lands.

Across the raging mountain river, through the fast-falling rain, on the desolate green bank the numberless Buddhas battered and forsaken smile, that slow still smile of One Who Understands, who understands All Things, and understanding is content.

Great Buddha, _Dai Nippon_, teach us.

LORD FUJI

“Where on the one hand is the province of Kai,
And on the other the province of Suruga,
Right in the midst between them
Stands out the high peak of Fuji.
The very clouds of Heaven dread to approach it;
Even the soaring birds reach not its summit in their flight.
Its burning fire is quenched by the snow;
The snow that falls is melted by the fire.
No words may tell of it, no name know I that fits it,
But a wondrous Deity it surely is.

* * * * *

Of Yamato, the Land of Sunrise,
It is the Peace-Giver, it is the God, it is the Treasure.
On the peak of Fuji, in the land of Suruga,
Never weary I of gazing.”

Japanese poet, eighth century.
(“Japanese Literature,” by W. G. Aston.)

I

PROLOGUE

From Pole to Pole the waters of the wide Pacific surge, unending and alone. Over the shifting plain the silence of the ocean broods. Here is man nothing; for the endless spaces of the ocean, the self-sufficiency of the unresting sea remain for ever outside of man, coldly non-human. A river or a hill can be loved into companionship, but the sea stays always strange.

Without ends or boundaries, the shifting waters sweep from Pole to Pole, solitary, changeless. Only the curve of the earth itself, or the weakness of man’s eyesight draws imaginary boundaries on the horizon. And the waste of the waters lies empty and still.

Coldly blue is the sea below, and the sky shutting down is blue too and bare. Two empty infinities which meeting set bounds to each other.

And within there is nothing. Only space; blue, bare space.

“In the beginning,” says the Scripture, “the waters below were separated from the waters above,” and out of the void came this world of two dimensions, so cold, blue and beautiful. It is immensity--empty.

Then did the spirit of God move on the face of the waters, move slowly and pass.

Into the empty blue came a white, still splendour. Softly it grew in the dome of the sky, unreal in its beauty. But two pale curves that stayed in the heavens, as the wandering snowflake seems to rest on its fall. Midway between blue and blue it stayed, this soft white splendour, stayed dreaming a pause.

For the spirit of God had passed; and the empty, blue vastness was filled with a sense of joy and elation. Earth’s fairest presence had risen high to the heavens. And it lay, two curving lines of exquisite splendour, breathed light on the sky; and white as the wing of a gull in the gleam of the sunshine, all shining with whiteness.

And the infinite plane of the waters stretches on to the Poles. And the endless space of the sky wraps the water around.

But the empty, blue vastness is gone.

It is blue sea. It is sky. They are framing a world, for Lord Fuji has come.

II

THE ASCENT

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

“A treasure given to mortal man
The God Protector watching o’er Japan.”

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.

* * * * *