A stupendous ghost!
Looking eastward from the great bridge over those sharply beautiful
mountains, green and blue, which tooth the horizon, I see a glorious
spectre towering to the sky. Its base is effaced by far mists: out of
the air the thing would seem to have shaped itself--a phantom cone,
diaphanously grey below, vaporously white above, with a dream of
perpetual snow--the mighty mountain of Daisen.
At the first approach of winter it will in one night become all blanched
from foot to crest; and then its snowy pyramid so much resembles that
Sacred Mountain, often compared by poets to a white inverted fan, half
opened, hanging in the sky, that it is called Izumo-Fuji, 'the Fuji of
Izumo.' But it is really in Hoki, not in Izumo, though it cannot be
seen from any part of Hoki to such advantage as from here. It is the one
sublime spectacle of this charming land; but it is visible only when the
air is very pure. Many are the marvellous legends related concerning
it, and somewhere upon its mysterious summit the Tengu are believed to
dwell.