THE DESCENT OF FUJIYAMA
From Saturday until Tuesday, three endless days and as many nights, the
whirling storm kept us prisoners in the dark, smoke-filled rest-house.
What had been the amusing incidents of one stormy night became our
intolerable routine of life. Escape was impossible, even for the hardy
mountaineers and pilgrims at the other end of the hut, and to unbar the
door for a momentary outlook threatened the demolition of the shelter.
A tempest at sea was not more awful in its fury, but our ears became
finally accustomed to the roar and hiss of the wind, and the persistent
blows it dealt the structure. The grave problem of provisioning the place
in time confronted us, and after our one day’s luncheon was exhausted, it
became a question how long the master of the station could provide even
fish and rice for forty people.
The two boys, or valets, brought by their sybarite masters, like all
Japanese servants out of their grooves, were utterly helpless, and
lay supine in their corners, covered, head and all, with futons. The
altitude, the cold, or the dilemma paralyzed their usually nimble
faculties, and our coolies were far more useful. We could not stand
upright under the heavy beams of the roof, and as the floor planks
had been taken up here and there to brace the doors with, walking was
difficult in that dark abode. While we grew impatient in our cage, the
four little naval cadets sat, or lay, quietly in their futons, hour after
hour, talking as cheerfully as if the sun were shining, their prospects
hopeful, and their summer suits of white duck designed for the Eighth
Station’s phenomenal climate. Throughout our incarceration the coolies
dozed and waked under their futons, sitting up only long enough to eat,
or play some childish game, and dropping back to reckon how much per diem
would accrue to them without an equivalent of work. When we found that
the smoky fireplace offered some warmth, we sat around the sunken box
with our feet in the ashes and handkerchiefs to our eyes to keep out the
blinding smoke.
In that intimate circle we learned the cook’s secrets, and watched him
shaving off his billets of dried fish with a plane, stewing them with
mushrooms and seasoning with soy and saké. This compound we found so
good that our flattered landlord brought out hot saké and insisted on an
exchange of healths. We noticed that in the midst of this hospitality he
went and made some offering or other at his little household altar, and,
writing something in a book, returned more benign and friendly than ever.
The preparation of red bean and barley soups, two sweetened messes that
only a Japanese could eat, and the boiling of rice seemed never to stop.
Twice a day the big copper caldron was set on its stone frame half full
of boiling water. When it bubbled most furiously over a brushwood fire, a
basketful of freshly washed and soaked rice was poured in. In a half-hour
the caldron was filled to the top with the full, snowy grains, ready for
the chopsticks of the waiting company.
Each night the master of the hut prophesied clear weather at five o’clock
in the morning, and each morning he prophesied clear weather for five
o’clock in the afternoon, but the wind howled, the sleet swept by in
clouds, and hail rattled noisily on roof and walls. The second afternoon
the master of the summit rest-hut appeared at the window, and, more dead
than alive, was drawn in by the excited coolies, who helped chafe his
limbs and pour cups of hot saké between his lips. The story of his battle
with the storm on the open, wind-swept cone satisfied us all to wait for
the clearing. An empty rice-box had forced him to attempt the journey to
revictual his station, and we wondered how soon our landlord would be
compelled to the same desperate effort.
On the third morning the visiting boniface and four wood-choppers
decided to attempt the descent, and when the door was unbarred, the pale
daylight and a changed wind, that entered the dim cave where we had been
imprisoned, foretold a clearing sky. As the clouds lifted, we could see
for miles down the wet and glistening mountain to a broad, green plain,
sparkling with flashing diamonds of lakes, and gaze down a sheer ten
thousand feet to the level of the sea. It was a view worth the three days
of waiting. The summit loomed clear and close at hand, and our western
mountaineers made two thousand feet of ascent in thirty minutes, the
rest of us following in a more deliberate procession, as befitted the
altitude. The coolies, in bright yellow oil-paper capes and hats, trooped
after us like a flock of canaries, gayly decorating the dark lava paths.
At the edge of the summit, on the rim of the crater, we passed under a
torii, climbed steep lava steps and entered the last station—a low, dark,
wretched, little wind-swept cabin, with one small door and a ten-inch
fireplace, where saké was warming for us.
Hardly had we arrived when the wind rose, the clouds shut down, and
again the rain drove in dense and whirling sheets. The adventurous ones,
who had pushed on to the edge of the crater to look in, were obliged to
creep back to safety on their hands and knees, for fear of being swept
over into that cauldron of boiling clouds and mist. It was no time to
make the circuit of the crater’s rim with its many shrines, or descend
the path-way, guarded by torii, to the crater’s bed. We hurried through
the formalities at the temple, where the benumbed priest branded the
alpenstocks, stamped our handkerchiefs and clothing, and gave us pictured
certificates of our ascent to that point. Then began a wild sliding and
plunging down a shoot of loose cinders to Station Number Eight, where
the landlord produced a book and read our three-days’ board bill from
a record of many pages. Everything was chanted out by items, even to
the saké and mushrooms that had been pressed upon us as a courtesy, and
it was only after many appeals for the sum total that he instinctively
ducked his head and named fifty-eight dollars for the seven of us. Then
ensued a deafening attack of remonstrances from men and valets, threats
and invectives in Japanese and English, lasting until the inn-keeping
Shylock agreed to take thirty dollars, received this moiety cheerfully,
and bade us adieu with many protestations of esteem.
Rubber and gossamer rain-cloaks were worse than useless in that
whirlwind, and haste was our one necessity. Dress skirts were sodden and
leaden masses, and mine being hung as an offering to Fuji-san, a red
Navajo blanket replaced it, and enveloped me completely. A yellow-clad
coolie securely fastened his rope, and we slipped, and plunged, and
rolled down a shoot of loose cinders. Sinking ankle-deep, we travelled as
if on runners through the wet ashes, sliding down in minutes stretches
that it had taken us as many hours to ascend, and stopping only at one or
two rest-houses for cups of hot tea, while we staggered and stumbled on
through rain that came ever harder and faster.
At Umagayeshi, where the dripping party waited for more tea, the sun
came gayly out and seemed to laugh at our plight. The sudden warmth,
the greenhouse steam and softness, were most grateful to us after our
hardships in the clouds. At Subashiri we put on the few dry garments
we had been fortunate enough to leave behind us. The tea-house windows
framed vignettes of Fuji, a clear blue and purple cone in a radiant,
cloud-dappled sky. With the prospect of a hot day to follow, it was
decided to push on to Miyanoshita, travelling all night, the kagos being
as comfortable as the flea-infested tea-house, and the men of our party
being obliged to walk on until they reached dry boots and clothes. Though
the coolies grumbled, stormed, and appealed, they had enjoyed three days
of absolute rest and full pay at Number Eight, and the walk of forty-five
miles, from the summit to Miyanoshita, is not an unusual jaunt for them
to make.
At Gotemba’s tea-house we found our companions in misfortune—the little
midshipmen—whom we joined in feasting on what the house could offer.
The old women in attendance, yellow and wrinkled as the crones of
ivory _netsukes_, were vastly interested in our Fuji experiences and
dilapidated costumes, and gave us rice, fish, sponge-cake, tea, and saké.
At midnight we roused the coolies from their five-hour rest, and prepared
for the fifteen-mile journey over O Tomi Toge pass. The little midshipmen
slid the screens and beckoned us up to the liliputian balcony again.
“It is the night Fuji,” said one of them, softly, pointing to the dark
violet cone, striped with its ghostly snow, and illuminated by a shrunken
yellow moon that hung fantastic above O Tomi Toge’s wall.
With our commander-in-chief perched high on a pack-horse, whose
chair-like saddle left his rider’s heels resting on the neck of the
animal, and the kago coolies slipping and floundering through the
bottomless mud of the roads, we once more started on our way. The whole
country was dark, silent, and deserted, and the only audible sound was
the chatter of our army of coolies, who chirped and frolicked like boys
out of school. The night air over the rice-fields was warm and heavy,
and seemed to suffocate us, and fire-flies drifted in and out among the
rushes and bamboos. Deep, roaring streams filled the channels that had
been mere silver threads of water a few days before. The coolies could
barely keep their footing as they waded waist-deep in the rushing water,
and at every ford we half expected to be drowned.
At the summit of the pass we dismounted, and the coolies scattered for a
long rest. The sacred mountain was clear and exquisite in the pale gray
of dawn; and while we waited to see the sun rise on Fuji, a dirty-brown
fog scudded in from the sea, crossed the high moon, and instantly the
plain faded from view and we were left, isolated Brocken figures, to eat
our four-o’clock breakfast of dry bread and chocolate, and return to the
kagos. Everywhere we encountered traces of a heavy storm, the path being
gullied and washed into a deep ditch with high banks, whose heavy-topped,
white lilies brushed into the kagos as we passed. Half asleep, we watched
the green panorama unfolding as we descended, and at eight o’clock we
were set down in Miyanoshita. Nesans ran hither and thither excitedly, to
bring coffee and toast, to prepare baths, produce the luggage we had left
behind, and mildly rehearse to the other domestics the astonishing story
of our adventures. By noon, when we came forth arrayed in the garb of
civilization, we were heroes.
For weeks after we returned to the plain, the treacherous Fujiyama stood
unusually clear and near at hand. “The summer Fuji,” its dark-brown
slopes only touched with a fine line or two of snow, is less beautiful
than “the winter Fuji,” with its glistening crown; and our Mount Rainier,
whose snows are eternal, whose wooded slopes shadow the dark-green waters
of Puget Sound, is lovelier still. But though we have the more glorious
mountain, the snow, the rocks, the forest, we have not the people
instinct with love of poetry and nature; we have not the race-refinement,
and the race-traditions, that would make of it another Fuji, invested
with the light of dream and legend, dear and near to every heart.