Part 5

On the very edge of the wood was a tea-house, the _Ichi-gō_, No. 1 station, a roughly built wooden-walled tea-house, on the edge of whose matting, with our feet on the path, we sat and drank tea, innumerable egg-bowls of hot green tea. While we were sitting here a whole party of pilgrims, in their white hose trousers, their white tunics tucked into their white _obi_, and their wash-basin-big straw hats, came down the path. They turned into the tea-house, and one old man, dropping on to the matting, rolled himself into a corner and was covered with _futon_. He had caught cold on the top, and was perfectly exhausted with pain and fatigue. But as he lay in the corner, clutching the _futon_ to him as though to press a concrete warmth into his numbed bones, there was in his eyes a look of dwelling content that not all the pain nor all the fatigue could overcome. He had climbed from the threshold to the sanctuary of Fuji; had knelt by the cloud-swept altar; felt the might of the God in the winds of his summit, in the still depths of his crater; caught up with Lord Fuji on high, he had looked down upon earth. What now was pain or fatigue?

* * * * *

The path from the tea-house struck out abruptly across the mountain, and we soon stood above the trees, stood on the bare cinder-slope that is Fuji. It was very much like walking up an ash-heap or a ballast-mound, and about as beautiful. Below us everything was hidden in a shifting mist; above, twenty feet of cinder-slope ended in a white wall. It was like climbing a black rope hung between two clouds.

After the ballast-heap came a lava-bed, where a molten river of lava had dried itself into high rocks and deep cracks, as the ice of a glacier. We crossed it obliquely, and in the twilight saw neither beginning nor end, neither from where it came nor to where it went; but its pinnacles and crevasses, its tumbled waves and jagged, piled-up ridges, lay lustreless and dark, as though of coal-black ice.

Once across this lava-glacier, and out of the dip formed by its bed, we stood on a sort of self-contained ash-heap, and looked down that long slope of Fuji which already lay below us.

Dimly through the faint floating veil of mist we could see all the green earth bare and smooth, with a darker line of hills as a child’s bank of mud curving round the black surface of the lakes. We were so high up, the lakes so far away, and the whole air so heavy with moisture that they looked in the misty light like polished slabs of black rock dropped into the green earth as one might sink stepping-stones into a lawn. As we watched the light seemed to thicken, the white mists spread through it as motes in a sunbeam, gathered themselves together. Swiftly they hid the black lakes; and boiling within the dark curve of the hills in billows of smoke, boiled over the mud-bank of hills, and blotting them out; submerged the green earth, and flowing rapidly upwards hid all the long slope of Fuji beneath a shoreless sea of fog.

Again we stood on a steep cinder-heap on the black rope which hung from void to void--alone.

* * * * *

And impenetrable Fuji remained. We simply climbed a cinder-path which ran from end to end of a never-ending, ever-retreating circle of cloud. And still within this grey-white circle we reached the _Ni-gō_, or No. 2 station. Here we were to stop the night, because No. 2 is larger and more comfortable than No. 4, and No. 8 was too far away.

No. 2 lay on the side of the path, its face looking over the precipice and its three sides well within a scooped-out hole in the cinder-heap. It was nothing but an ordinary Japanese room, only its walls were of solid wood, protected outside by cut blocks of lava, and inside with a lining of folded _futon_ on shelves. Far away in the back of the room the charcoal fire was sunk in a sort of earth well, so that you could sit on the matting with your legs in the hole, absorb warmth, or do your cooking. Otherwise the tea-house was bare matted space on which each comer staked out a claim for himself with his luggage.

Having chosen a good site in a corner less draughty than the rest of the enclosure, we proceeded to unpack and wash. Just outside the middle of the open wall of the house, and full on the pathway of Fuji, stood a large waterbutt. Having been directed by the family--an amiable man, an indifferent wife, and an inquisitive boy--to wash outside, I stepped on to the pathway. The tub was half full of water and looked very like the ordinary bath-tub of Japan. It was the first time I had seen a bath out of doors, though they figure so largely in travellers’ tales; still there was nothing else, so boldly I plunged the top half of myself into the water.

A simultaneous scream from the man, the wife and the boy, brought me up dripping and bewildered.

What had I done?

Not sinned against their moral code, surely. No--worse. Washed in the drinking-water!

Luckily there was more, enough for endless tea that night, and to-morrow fresh water could be fetched. But my wash came to an abrupt end. Of course what I ought to have done was to unearth a brass pan tucked away behind the tub, take down a bamboo dipper from a lava-block, dip out water from the tub into the pan and wash in that. Quite simple, naturally, when it was all explained and the pan and the dipper produced, but all problems always are simple after the explanation.

The amiable man remained amiable even after this catastrophe, and the indifferent wife had not been shaken from her indifference save for the space of one brief scream, while the small boy, at such an exhibition of curious manners on the part of the _Ijin San_, grew more inquisitive than ever, and we fried ham, ate tinned tongue, cut slices of bread, and drank foreign wine under a close and exhaustive series of comments which were questions.

It grew dark rapidly as we ate. And as relays of pilgrims came in out of the night to fling themselves down on the matting, swallow cupfuls of hot tea and exchange long compliments with the man, the wife, and the guide, and disappear again into the night, we congratulated ourselves. No. 4 must have been very full. At eight o’clock, when the _amado_ were drawn and the tea-house became a compact box, No. 2 had no guests but the _Ijin San_.

It was time to go to bed. The man put out the one smoking lamp by the fire-pit which had cast such lurid yellow lights on the white clothes of the pilgrims as they sat and drank, and such murky, gigantic shadows on the rest of the room; the boy went to bed in a corner, and we rolled ourselves up in our carefully Keatinged _futon_ and tried to sleep.

It was cold. There were fleas. And Fuji sent us down a draught which simply whistled through the wooden walls, the folded _futon_ and the lava-blocks. And the sense of the unusual, of the rest-house, the cinder-path and of Fuji, crept into our slumbers, holding back sleep.

* * * * *

When we awoke it was already five o’clock and the _amado_ were open. The boy, careering over the matting, was detailing how the _Ijin San_ slept.

We shook ourselves out of our _futon_ and went outside to wash--not in the waterbutt.

Already, when we stepped upon the cinder-path, the unseen sun had touched the white clouds lying like islands in the blue beneath. And as we watched they coloured blushing, till in blood-red pools they studded thick the air below. They lay away out over the land, moving slowly through the vapoury mist. It was as if the air was half precipitated, the atmosphere made visible. We looked down on to the world below and saw it as one sees white stones at the bottom of deep water.

The hidden sun was rising swiftly, and as he rose the blood-red pools faded out; the vapoury white air grew thinner, seemed slowly drying, until clear and invisible, we looked through it and saw the green earth stretching away and away to the level line of the horizon; while midway the little lakes lay sepia-black upon the green, curving so comfortably into the tiny crescent of the hills all dark with purple shadows. A fresh-washed world lying green and flat at the bottom of 7,000 feet of atmosphere.

* * * * *

It was cold, the water in the brass pan colder, and tingling with sudden chill we ran rapidly up the path past the scooped-out hollow where the rest-house hid--and stood transfixed.

Above us, touching us, and black against a sky all blue and liquid as the living sea, was Fuji San.

His clear-cut lines rose up quickly, and the mountain, whose slope our hands were holding, seemed to draw back its summit that our eyes might see it, so close it lay, so steep above. Round as a tower it rose in curves of grace, a black lighthouse springing towards the sky, delicate as Giotto’s lily tower: slender in its grace and fragile. This was no rude Colossus, mighty with brute strength, but a god, great in grace, and strong, because divine.

Upwards the soaring lines rose up, coal-black, and the growing light caught faintly at a wine-red patch where the sullen fires were sleeping, caught and turned it redder; redly it glowed, smouldering into life, the living life of Fujiyama.

Beneath the rounded dip of the summit were two tiny cracks, and the sky 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.