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.
* * * * *
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.