It was through the transparent darkness of a cloudless April
morning, a little before sunrise, that he saw again the mountains
of his native land,--far lofty sharpening sierras, towering
violet-black out of the circle of an inky sea. Behind the steamer
which was bearing him back from exile the horizon was slowly
filling with rosy flame. There were some foreigners already on
deck, eager to obtain the first and fairest view of Fuji from the
Pacific;--for the first sight of Fuji at dawn is not to be
forgotten in this life or the next. They watched the long
procession of the ranges, and looked over the jagged looming into
the deep night, where stars were faintly burning still,--and they
could not see Fuji. "Ah!" laughed an officer they questioned,
"you are looking too low! higher up--much higher!" Then they
looked up, up, up into the heart of the sky, and saw the mighty
summit pinkening like a wondrous phantom lotos-bud in the flush
of the coming day: a spectacle that smote them dumb. Swiftly the
eternal snow yellowed into gold, then whitened as the sun reached
out beams to it over the curve of the world, over the shadowy
ranges, over the very stars, it seemed; for the giant base
remained viewless. And the night fled utterly; and soft blue
light bathed all the hollow heaven; and colors awoke from sleep;
--and before the gazers there opened the luminous bay of
Yokohama, with the sacred peak, its base ever invisible, hanging
above all like a snowy ghost in the arch of the infinite day.
Still in the wanderer's ears the words rang, "_Ah! you are
looking too low!--higher up--much higher!_"--making vague rhythm
with an immense, irresistible emotion swelling at his heart. Then
everything dimmed: he saw neither Fuji above, nor the nearing
hills below, changing their vapory blue to green, nor the
crowding of the ships in the bay; nor anything of the modern
Japan; he saw the Old. The land-wind, delicately scented with
odors of spring, rushed to him, touched his blood, and startled
from long-closed cells of memory the shades of all that he had
once abandoned and striven to forget. He saw the faces of his
dead: he knew their voices over the graves of the years. Again he
was a very little boy in his father's yashiki, wandering from
luminous room to room, playing in sunned spaces where
leaf-shadows trembled on the matting, or gazing into the soft
green dreamy peace of the landscape garden. Once more he felt the
light touch of his mother's hand guiding his little steps to the
place of morning worship, before the household shrine, before the
tablets of the ancestors; and the lips of the man murmured again,
with sudden new-found meaning, the simple prayer of the child.