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.