I see the gōriki hurrying forward far away,--one of them carrying the
eggs round his neck!... Now there are no more trees worthy of the
name,--only scattered stunted growths resembling shrubs. The black
road curves across a vast grassy down; and here and there I see large
black patches in the green surface,--bare spaces of ashes and scoriæ;
showing that this thin green skin covers some enormous volcanic deposit
of recent date.... As a matter of history, all this district was buried
two yards deep in 1707 by an eruption from the side of Fuji. Even in
far-off Tōkyō the rain of ashes covered roofs to a depth of sixteen
centimetres. There are no farms in this region, because there is little
true soil; and there is no water. But volcanic destruction is not
eternal destruction; eruptions at last prove fertilizing; and the divine
“Princess-who-causes-the-flowers-to-blossom-brightly” will make this
waste to smile again in future hundreds of years.
* * * * *
... The black openings in the green surface become more numerous and
larger. A few dwarf-shrubs still mingle with the coarse grass.... The
vapors are lifting; and Fuji is changing color. It is no longer a
glowing blue, but a dead sombre blue. Irregularities previously hidden
by rising ground appear in the lower part of the grand curves. One of
these to the left,--shaped like a camel’s hump,--represents the focus of
the last great eruption.
* * * * *
The land is not now green with black patches, but black with green
patches; and the green patches dwindle visibly in the direction of the
peak. The shrubby growths have disappeared. The wheels of the kuruma,
and the feet of the runners sink deeper into the volcanic sand.... The
horse is now attached to the kuruma with ropes, and I am able to advance
more rapidly. Still the mountain seems far away; but we are really
running up its flank at a height of more than five thousand feet.
* * * * *
Fuji has ceased to be blue of any shade. It is
black,--charcoal-black,--a frightful extinct heap of visible ashes and
cinders and slaggy lava.... Most of the green has disappeared. Likewise
all of the illusion. The tremendous naked black reality,--always
becoming more sharply, more grimly, more atrociously defined,--is a
stupefaction, a nightmare.... Above--miles above--the snow patches glare
and gleam against that blackness,--hideously. I think of a gleam of
white teeth I once saw in a skull,--a woman’s skull,--otherwise burnt to
a sooty crisp.
* * * * *
So one of the fairest, if not the fairest of earthly visions, resolves
itself into a spectacle of horror and death.... But have not all human
ideals of beauty, like the beauty of Fuji seen from afar, been created
by forces of death and pain?--are not all, in their kind, but composites
of death, beheld in retrospective through the magical haze of inherited
memory?