6:40 _a. m._--Start for the top.... Hardest and roughest stage of
the journey, through a wilderness of lava-blocks. The path zigzags
between ugly masses that project from the slope like black teeth. The
trail of cast-away sandals is wider than ever.... Have to rest every
few minutes.... Reach another long patch of the snow that looks like
glass-beads, and eat some. The next station--a half-station--is closed;
and the ninth has ceased to exist.... A sudden fear comes to me, not of
the ascent, but of the prospective descent by a route which is too steep
even to permit of comfortably sitting down. But the guides assure me
that there will be no difficulty, and that most of the return-journey
will be by another way,--over the interminable level which I wondered at
yesterday,--nearly all soft sand, with very few stones. It is called the
_hashiri_ (“glissade”); and we are to descend at a run!...
All at once a family of field-mice scatter out from under my feet in
panic; and the gōriki behind me catches one, and gives it to me. I hold
the tiny shivering life for a moment to examine it, and set it free
again. These little creatures have very long pale noses. How do they
live in this waterless desolation,--and at such an altitude,--especially
in the season of snow? For we are now at a height of more than eleven
thousand feet! The gōriki say that the mice find roots growing under the
stones....
* * * * *
Wilder and steeper;--for me, at least, the climbing is sometimes on
all fours. There are barriers which we surmount with the help of
ladders. There are fearful places with Buddhist names, such as the
_Sai-no-Kawara_, or Dry Bed of the River of Souls,--a black waste strewn
with heaps of rock, like those stone-piles which, in Buddhist pictures
of the underworld, the ghosts of children build....
* * * * *
Twelve thousand feet, and something,--the top! Time, 8:20 a. m....
Stone huts; Shintō shrine with tōrii; icy well, called the Spring of
Gold; stone tablet bearing a Chinese poem and the design of a tiger;
rough walls of lava-blocks round these things,--possibly for protection
against the wind. Then the huge dead crater,--probably between a
quarter of a mile and half-a-mile wide, but shallowed up to within
three or four hundred feet of the verge by volcanic detritus,--a cavity
horrible even in the tones of its yellow crumbling walls, streaked
and stained with every hue of scorching. I perceive that the trail of
straw sandals ends _in_ the crater. Some hideous over-hanging cusps
of black lava--like the broken edges of a monstrous cicatrix--project
on two sides several hundred feet above the opening; but I certainly
shall not take the trouble to climb them. Yet these,--seen through
the haze of a hundred miles,--through the soft illusion of blue
spring-weather,--appear as the opening snowy petals of the bud of the
Sacred Lotos!... No spot in this world can be more horrible, more
atrociously dismal, than the cindered tip of the Lotos as you stand upon
it.
But the view--the view for a hundred leagues,--and the light of the
far faint dreamy world,--and the fairy vapors of morning,--and the
marvellous wreathings of cloud: all this, and only this, consoles me for
the labor and the pain.... Other pilgrims, earlier climbers,--poised
upon the highest crag, with faces turned to the tremendous East,--are
clapping their hands in Shintō prayer, saluting the mighty Day....
The immense poetry of the moment enters into me with a thrill. I
know that the colossal vision before me has already become a memory
ineffaceable,--a memory of which no luminous detail can fade till the
hour when thought itself must fade, and the dust of these eyes be
mingled with the dust of the myriad million eyes that also have looked,
in ages forgotten before my birth, from the summit supreme of Fuji to
the Rising of the Sun.