Part 4
And within there is nothing. Only space; blue, bare space.
“In the beginning,” says the Scripture, “the waters below were separated from the waters above,” and out of the void came this world of two dimensions, so cold, blue and beautiful. It is immensity--empty.
Then did the spirit of God move on the face of the waters, move slowly and pass.
Into the empty blue came a white, still splendour. Softly it grew in the dome of the sky, unreal in its beauty. But two pale curves that stayed in the heavens, as the wandering snowflake seems to rest on its fall. Midway between blue and blue it stayed, this soft white splendour, stayed dreaming a pause.
For the spirit of God had passed; and the empty, blue vastness was filled with a sense of joy and elation. Earth’s fairest presence had risen high to the heavens. And it lay, two curving lines of exquisite splendour, breathed light on the sky; and white as the wing of a gull in the gleam of the sunshine, all shining with whiteness.
And the infinite plane of the waters stretches on to the Poles. And the endless space of the sky wraps the water around.
But the empty, blue vastness is gone.
It is blue sea. It is sky. They are framing a world, for Lord Fuji has come.
II
THE ASCENT
Geologists state that Fuji San is a volcano, a young volcano, 12,365 feet high. Philologists add that _San_ is derived from a Chinese term meaning mountain, and is not the familiar Japanese title which we render by Mr., Lord, or Master; while _Fuji_ is, they declare, a word of Aino origin. And then they all fall silent.
These are the facts: the material, provable facts, such as western text-books publish. But to Japan, Fuji San is much more, and most of this is not text-book fact.
National tradition says that Fuji arose in a single night, and at the same time Lake Biwa, one hundred and forty miles away, was suddenly formed. There is a legend that, in those far-away days of _mukashi, mukashi_--once upon a time--the Elixir of Life was taken to the top of the mountain, where it still remains. And popular belief declares that all the cinders and ashes brought down by the pilgrims’ feet are carried each night back to the summit of Fuji.
To the people, Fuji is sacred; holy to some as the abiding-place of the Goddess _Ko-no-hana-saku-ya-hime_, She who makes the Blossoms of the Trees to Bloom, but sacred to all for its majesty, its unutterable beauty. The peasants of the country-side call Fuji _Oyama_, Honourable Mountain; and to the people Fuji San is Lord and Master. Deep in their hearts, and unassailable by western facts, the worship of his beauty and his power lies throbbing. During that brief six weeks of summer when Fuji’s wind-swept sides alone are climbable, the pilgrims come in thousands, in ten thousands. They dress themselves in white from head to foot. They carry long staves of pure white wood in their hands, each stamped with the temple crest, and in bands and companies they climb the mountain. And always the leader at their head, his staff crowned with a tinkling mass of bells, like tiny cymbals, chants the hymn of Fuji. From base to summit, as the white-clad pilgrims climb, the tinkling cymbals clash, and the voice of the leader rises loud at each refrain:
“We are going, we are going to the top.”
Above the clash of the bells the chorus echoes:
“To the top, to the top, to the top.”
“We are going,” chants the leader, and the tiny cymbals clash--“We are going, we are going to the top.”
The western facts of modern text-books cannot touch the meaning of this mountain; the love of its long curving line which permeates the nation’s art, the adoration of its beauty, and the reverence of its power.
Already in a time which to us upstart western nations is almost _mukashi, mukashi_, in the days before King Alfred burnt the cakes, a Japanese poet had caught and expressed the feeling of the nation for its mountain: for he wrote of Fujiyama as
“A treasure given to mortal man The God Protector watching o’er Japan.”
And to-day the God Protector watches still, and yearly the people come, in the white garb of pilgrims, chanting to his shrine.
For six short summer weeks they come. Then the winds rush down, the snow falls, the tempests rage, and Lord Fuji lives alone. No human being has yet stayed a winter on his summit, and even in the summer weeks the winds will blow the lava blocks from the walls of the rest-houses, and sometimes the pilgrim from the path. For Fuji stands alone, not one peak among a range, but utterly alone. Rising straight out of the sea on one side, and from the great Tokyo plain on the other, his twelve thousand three hundred and sixty-five feet, in two long curving lines of exquisite grace, rise up and up into the blue, and not one inch of one foot is hidden or lost; it is all there, visible as a tower built on a treeless plain. It dominates the landscape. It can be seen from thirteen provinces; and from a hundred miles at sea the pale white peak of Fuji floats above the blue.
* * * * *
It was a day in the beginning of August, in the very middle of those hot three weeks which are the great festival of Fuji San, in the simmering dawn of a summer’s day that we left Tokyo for Subashiri. As the train approached Gotemba the whole crowded carriageful of Japanese looked eagerly for Fuji. The train was climbing slowly by a mountain stream, and we were all looking, looking, beyond the dark green pine-trees of the river’s bank. Suddenly, for one dazzling moment, the deep blue cone of Fuji lay pillowed on a bank of clouds in the middle of the clear blue sky. Then, swiftly, the clouds rolled up and up. Fuji San was gone. The whole carriageful gave vent to those long strangled _h’s_ of admiration and delight, and with a murmured “Fuji San seeing have” sank back on their heels on the cushions.
Gotemba is the nearest railway station to Fujiyama, and the highest. It lies a thousand feet up. Being the most accessible, it is the most usual starting-point for the climb, but it is not the most picturesque. A wonderful line of trams now connects Gotemba with Subashiri, and even with Yoshida, a place half round the base of the mountain. We were to start from Subashiri and come down to Yoshida, and return by the lakes. So from the station we walked up the straggling, badly kept street of Gotemba, where every house is a hotel and every hotel hangs out many advertisements in the shape of cotton streamers twelve feet long and six inches wide, which are attached by rings to bamboo poles. So through groves of white and blue and brown banners all adorned with beautiful Chinese symbols we walked to the tramway.
A dive through a wooden archway between two tea-houses, where a ticket-hole and a wooden barrier composed the station, and we were there. The trams stood under the archway; the lines were lost in the black cindery mud--and they were both Japanese--the tram-lines, just rows of knitting-needles and laid very close together, the trams diminished by the national taste for the national needs to a little oblong box like a stunted bathing-machine. Our tram stood from ground to roof perhaps some five feet high. By taking off our hats we could just manage to sit down, and by judiciously fitting our knees into one another like elaborate dovetailing we got in width-ways, and we only got in at all by entering the door sideways. Fat people do not travel in Japanese trams--not unless they have a ladder and sit on the roof. The only way to insinuate luggage is to coax it through the window-frames, which, as there were only two to a side, were almost once and a half times the width of the door, not more. In the Fuji tramways pilgrims’ hats are not admitted. This is no prohibition. It is an impossibility, for the diameter of the pilgrim hat, which is twice as large as the largest halo, is equal in size to the width of the entire tram. So the pilgrims hang their huge circles of straw hats, like scooped-out orange halves, outside; and our tram before it started became a new kind of armoured train.
In this dumpy bathing-box we had room for four a side. We took five and thought it empty; smiled at six; submitted to seven; where an eighth would have disposed himself I do not know, he would certainly have got in, but the puzzle would have been to have found a vacant cubic foot of space for his occupation. Trams are never full in Japan. There is always room for more, if the more arrive. In this case the more got in at a small junction outside the back lanes of Gotemba. They got in, three of them, and with huge bundles too. Then the conductor looked round inquiringly and smiled, whereupon two polite pilgrims of lighter build than the newcomers gave up their seats and wedged themselves into the window-frames, while the bundles were deposited on the continuous strata of passenger. What happened to the third I do not know. He got in.
Then we started, really started, for there was no other halting-place, no village or station between here and Subashiri. Nothing but a broad, bare sweep of upward-tending common, where multitudes of wild flowers grew out of the cindery soil.
As we went on, the faintly curving common, which always sloped round and up, grew wilder and wilder. There were fewer flowers on the black soil. Sometimes the cinders lay all bare in large dull patches against the coarse grass. We were on the broad swelling slope of Fuji, on the edge of the first ripple before it dies away into the smooth water of the plain below. And we were crawling slowly from the first to the second ripple as a fly crawls round the curve of an orange. Fuji himself was invisible. For all we could see he did not exist. Spread out before our eyes was only the endless swelling line of the green common, always curving round and up. From time to time our driver blew a melancholy thin note from a tiny copper horn shaped like a thickened comma and ornamented with a worked band of brass, a pathetic far-off note unknown to western scales.
Our tram-line was laid among the ample cinders of Fuji’s burnt-out fires, and sometimes the curves were very sharp. Then the conductor, balanced on the step and grasping the window-frame with both hands, jerked the tram towards him to keep it on the lines; and we rounded the curves in triumph. The compact mass of passenger which filled the tram interior looked on unperturbed, while those in the window-frames kindly adjusted their weight to assist the conductor. And the melancholy thin note of the copper horn travelled over the long slope of the upward-tending common as we crawled slowly on.
In the midst of a perfect stocking-heel of knitting-needles, which all looked as though they were about to begin violently knitting at once, the tram stopped, and the compact mass of passenger disintegrated itself slowly. Having been the first to enter we were the last to detach ourselves from the general lump, and when we did recover a separate entity the knitting-needles lay gleaming in the cindery mud--and there was nothing else. We stumbled on over them for some time, until a ticket-hole in a sentry-box restored our belief that it was a stopping-place and not an accident. So we stood still and shouted for our tea-house boy by name. He came running, in long, tight-fitting, blue trousers like thick cotton hose and a blue tunic; and he was a girl, a pretty bright-coloured girl with daintily coiffured hair; and we all set off for the tea-house.
Subashiri is another straggling ill-kept street, all tea-houses and long cotton banners tied to bamboo poles, and our tea-house was the last of them all. It lay on the very edge of Fuji, and when we left it, after all our preparations had been completed, our lunch eaten, our guide engaged, we stepped straight on to the endless curve of upward-tending common.
I should have said our horses stepped, for the first stage of Fuji San is climbable on horses, pack-horses of a unique Japanese breed, which bite. They are harnessed with elaborate trappings in scarlet and gold, saddled with huge wooden saddles, rising like the prow of a ship behind, and sloping so steeply that the middle is one long knife-blade ridge, and only a tight hold of the stirrups prevents the rider from falling. All ride straddle-legged. I do not recommend Japanese pack-horses for pleasure, comfort, or security.
We plodded along over the bare common with its eternal long sweep upwards, like the swell of a great Atlantic roller, and the freshness and the coldness seemed to lift us out of Japan and carry us miles and miles north, to the chill summer of a northern land. The path which cut winding across the long up-sweep of the green common was black as ink, and shining with the wet of mountain clouds. Fuji was invisible, but as the deep rumble of the thunder, deadened behind the thick white clouds which bounded path and common, rolled slowly out of hearing it was as if Great Fuji spoke. Behind the mist the presence of the “honourable mountain” could be surely felt. Already the world seemed sunk away and the pilgrimage begun.
Over the green common the pack-horses plodded. Our guide and the little girl groom, in her thick blue hose and dark blue tunic, were far behind talking in peace. The big drops of rain which the thunder brought had ceased to fall, and the freshness and the chill coming after the tropical heat of the plain stung strength to life again. Even the pack-horses grew less sulky, and urging made them shuffle into something near a trot. But this outbreak of energy, which lasted perhaps eighty yards, was more than enough for comfort, though it added to experience, for like the knights of old who “clove” their enemies in two, we too “clove,” but in another direction. It was painful. So the horses sank back into their bad-tempered pace, and the wide common swept onwards and upwards.
After awhile the monotony of the black path crossing the green common was varied by stunted bushes which, gradually growing bigger and bigger, actually enclosed the cinder-track as English hedges an English lane. But the change was brief and the sloping green world with the long black line of path winding across it came back again.
The pack-horses plodded bad-temperedly on, and the structure of that saddle seemed to be petrifying in my frame. A blot in the path which had lain for so long on the edge of the common came gradually nearer until it widened into a deep oblong pit filled with the rakings of a thousand fires. Through this we ploughed our way, and the loose cinders came over the feet of the horses. With a good deal of exertion we climbed out again, then a few yards, a sharp turn, and we passed an empty row of sheds, for we had reached the _Mma gaeshi_--“Horse-turn-back” station. My horse evidently understood the Chinese characters of the tea-house sign, for no sooner did he see them than he promptly walked into one of the sheds, with me clinging affectionately to his neck to avoid the shock of the roof on my chest. But promptly as he walked in, the little girl groom and the boy guide were prompter; with a rush they were at his head, hauling him out again. He objected strongly, snarling like an ill-used dog, and so did I, but we were backed out of the shed at last.
We did not “horse-turn-back,” we were going to take our steeds on one more station. The stations on Fuji, which are nothing but the native tea-house, rougher, ruder, and less scrupulously clean, are mostly built right across the actual path itself. You go in at one side and out at the other.
Up to the very threshold of the tea-house the sweep of the wet green common rolled, like a gigantic, motionless wave that never breaks. It was a bare wild world bounded only by the pale walls of the distant clouds. But on the other side the path plunged steeply into a thick interminable wood, where the great trees dripped slowly, with the heavy persistency of Fate, and the dark trunks glistened uncertainly with wet. The little girl groom and the boy guide came and led the horses carefully, for the path was very steep, and the thick roots of the trees stretched like cords above the cinders.
This stage was short. At the next tea-house, which lay confined as a lake between the walls of the mountain, we said “good-bye” to the ill-tempered horses and to the little girl groom. The boy was to take us to the top and down to Yoshida. Then the wood, which the tea-house had interrupted no more than a buoy the ocean, stretched on. The great trees dripped coldly, with that chill feel of damp green things that makes the springtime of the north: coldly fresh as though the running sappy life were chill as mountain water, as though the growing trees were enwrapped in invisible ice and the very air made of impalpable snow.
In the midst of the wood stood a little desolate shrine, its floor was nothing but the black stamped earth, its roof of roughest thatch kept down with lava-stones, and only the tiny altar had walls at all. Behind a sort of wooden bar the gods sat dim, and a mournful old priest was their only attendant.
Straight towards the altar led the mountain path. This was the gateway of Lord Fuji. Each path that climbs the “honourable mountain” leads through a temple to the temple on the top. At the first shrine the pilgrim buys his long white staff, stamped with the temple crest, which he carries with him upwards to the summit.
We bought our staves. And the old man, thrusting a thin bar of iron like a stick of sealing-wax into the charcoal fire, burnt the crest of Subashiri’s shrine into the clean white wood, and with a courteous gesture he said the prayer which we, unknowing, had left unsaid. Lord Fuji is neither fierce nor exclusive, all the world may come as pilgrims through his gateways. From the great Sun-Goddess the Mikado sprang, and the people of Japan are all kin to the Shintō gods, but the Shintō gods themselves welcomed the Lord Buddha when he came. Side by side with the older gods Buddha’s temples stand to-day, and Lord Buddha, too, once said, “All men are one”; and again, “All living things are brothers to mankind”; for Buddha, like the modern scientists, declared the world, all worlds, and all that in them is, one, in substance one.
Three steps from the temple and the trees of the wood shut over it as waters over a stone. It was lost. Lord Fuji is greater than his temples. With the help of our staves we climbed on up the steep cinder-path, till the great green trees, dripping slowly, dwindled, drew back, were ended.
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!