Part 6

We were to sleep in Yoshida that night, and for us too it was time to go. So leaving our money on the edge of the fire-pit we crawled out of the hut. The image sitting on its heels never stirred; with one swift glance beneath the eyelids, he had reckoned the money to the last _sen_, but whether more or less than he expected, he remained immovable, magnificently unconscious, occupied solely in bowing us out. Had it been less than the proper charge we certainly should have heard of it through the guide, but as tea is never charged for, each visitor pays for it according to his rank, exigencies, generosity, and the status of the tea-house. In reality, of course, it is payment for attendance as well as tea.

The Japanese hold that no service performed can ever have a money equivalent. In their economy, money was never a real asset, as courage, knowledge or art, and they ignored it, when they did not despise it. So in the old days, those trades which had most to do with money, whose aim seemed to be the getting of money, were looked down on. Shopkeepers and merchants ranked below swordsmiths, peasants and artisans. Only the ignoble would choose such as a life’s work, and if to-day this idea has hindered commerce, if it has produced the low standard of some business men, and consequently the foreigner’s bad opinion of them, it has, on the other hand, lifted the nation out of the rut of sordid greed, made it seek after, and lay fast hold of, that which seems to it true--made of its people a race of men, of gentlemen, honourable, high-principled, and capable of indomitable devotion to their ideal.

* * * * *

We stepped off the summit of Fuji San into a wet white cloud, which was the sky of the earth below. For the first two stages the way down was the same as the way up, but at No. 8 the paths divided, the one to Yoshida leading away to the left.

After we had made a sort of semi-tour of the mountain we climbed over a lava-ridge and found ourselves in the centre of a black scoop in Fuji’s side that, coming from above, stretched interminably downwards. And the whole of the huge groove was a mass of the loosest, most shifting cinder. There was no path. One went down. At each step all the cinders on that part of Fuji slid bodily, tumbling over each other in their haste. You slid too, until the cinders, piling themselves up and up, reached the knee, and abruptly you stopped, only to pull out that leg and begin to slide again with the other. The rate at which one shot down was prodigious, and the method alarming. Each step seemed to start half the mountain rolling, rolling, for ever downwards, and there seemed no particular reason why the other half with you on it should not roll away too. Positively, as the torrent of cinders rolled and rolled and rolled, the conviction that Fujiyama must look smaller next morning grew upon me. Until with a flash of understanding I remembered the legend of the dust brought down by the pilgrims’ feet flying each night back to the mountain. And it seemed a very necessary explanation, and quite convincing too, when I looked at the tons and tons of cinders which my feet alone were sending down Fuji’s side.

After awhile the slope grew even steeper, and the cinders from black became a deep dull red. And still one shot downwards. Small patches of powdery, grey snow sprinkled with tiny round spots were tucked away here between the red cinders, and the whole slope was covered with the straw sandals of former pilgrims. They were scattered over the red cinders like a new kind of vegetation hardier than the rest, and there were thousands on thousands of them.

And still we shot downwards. At too steep an angle now to be brought up merely by the weight of the cinders, so that we were obliged to invent brakes with our more or less free foot, our extended arms, or the angle of our bodies; and we were very glad indeed of our staves to put any sort of term to the long uncomfortable slide.

It was a long while before we passed out of the zone of the _waraji_, and saw real little green things growing between the cinders. They looked utterly miserable and degenerate, but they did make the ballast solider, and the sliding easier.

It was a gigantic slide, but we brought up at last on a ridge of grey rock, over which we had to climb carefully, for it was full of holes. On the other side of this ridge the degenerate green weeds had grown into degenerate green plants; and after a few more slides and climbs the plants became bushes, stunted and miserable, but bushes, and we came out on to a sort of natural grass platform, before the rest-house of No. 4, Yoshida side. It was dirty, the first dirty house I had ever seen in Japan. Below us, as though stopped short by a word of command, “Thus far and no further,” were the trees; the tops of the nearest were on a level with the platform, but not one grew upon it.

With the cinder-slope behind us we stepped off the grass platform straight into the forest. It was a beautiful forest. First firs, and then, as we went downwards, green trees, small oaks and cryptomerias of all kinds.

To feet weary of ballast-heaps, the forest footpath was a rest refreshing, and the delight of growing trees and green fresh leaves after _waraji_ and cinders, an enchantment. But Fuji had not finished his surprises or his trials. Soon the pathway disappeared from under our feet, and only the roots of the trees remained. On these we had to walk, and they were slippery, knotted, and far apart, and full of tangled holes that caught and tripped the feet.

A polite Japanese student came and walked with us a little way “to improve his English,” but his feet in their _waraji_ stepped over the tree-roots faster than ours in our boots, and we were soon left alone again.

Gradually, as we went downwards, the forest altered from the austere wood of the mountain to the rich luxuriant wood of the plains, green with moss, covered with creepers, dripping with big juicy drops of water as though rich sap were oozing from every vein.

All through the wood there were tiny tea-houses, set under a tree and lost among the branches. We passed No. 1 at least seven times, each time certain that it really must be the real original No. 1, and that the “horse-turn-back” station, where we could get a _basha_ to carry us to Yoshida, was necessarily “the next.” After the weary sliding down that abrupt slope, the muscles of one’s legs were all trembling with the strain, and the tree-roots, slippery and uncertain, became doubly difficult. We were still going down so steeply that the hollow of the pathway lay like a green chimney below us. Slowly up through this living funnel came the pilgrim’s chant.

“We are going,” and the little bells clashed out triumphant--“we are going to the top.”

Then the deep sing-song of the chorus, coming nearer with each syllable, grew louder:

“Top ... the top ... to the top.”

We waited while the chant coming up from the green depths below came nearer, came past us, went on.

From the green heights above it sounded down.

“We are going,” and the tiny cymbals clashed--“we are going to the top.”

And faintly echoing from above came the answer: “To the top ... the top ... top.”

* * * * *

And still the first stations succeeded one another, and the tired feet and the aching muscles grew more weary. The wood was dense as ever, but less steep, and at last there came earth as well as tree-roots for a pathway.

We passed through another station, half tea-house, half temple, where a man sat behind a tray of thin irons stamped with the temple’s crest, and where gods and tea-bowls filled the shelves. The path went through it and out again, under the trees, a path of good stamped earth. Then twisting suddenly it ended in four smooth green steps that led down into a natural amphitheatre, with tea-houses on each side. This was the _Mma gaeshi_--“horse-turn-back” station--Yoshida side. Away to the left were several square boxes on wheels, otherwise the stage was empty. It was, indeed, exactly like a “set” in an opera.

We hobbled, it was so difficult to walk on _flat_ earth, to a tea-house and sat down demanding _basha_. Slowly a man entered right front, and crossing left centre tipped up a square box and waited. Then another man, entering left front, harnessed a horse to it. This took them half an hour, because they wanted four times too much for the drive to Yoshida, and at each refusal, at each expostulation, at each rebate, the one man dropped the square box down on the ground and the other gave up harnessing the horse. Meanwhile we drank tea and monotonously repeated our price. After half an hour the _basha_ was finally harnessed, and crossing left front we got in.

This _basha_ was simply a square box without a lid, mounted on wheels. You sat on a piece of matting spread at the bottom, leant against the wooden back and clutched hard at the sides to keep yourself in. The driver sat on the shaft and used his feet as a brake. The reins consisted of one length of straw rope attached to the left side of the horse’s head.

For the first half-hour the relief of stretching out one’s miserable, trembling legs was pure bliss, after that, _basha_-driving was pleasant but jolty, and after that it became renewed torture to endure the jolting, and the aches in one’s back and arms were vigorous and persistent. Road there was none, only two large ruts, in, over and among which we wandered.

The trees stopped as abruptly above the natural amphitheatre of _Mma gaeshi_ as they had begun below the platform of No. 4. And for the whole two hours of our journey to Yoshida we travelled over an immense far-reaching common, one of the soft ripples at Fuji’s base. There was not a house or a village to be seen, nothing but the wide stretch of green common.

It was half-past five when the _basha_ started out among the ruts, and the clear, colourless light of a northern evening--we were 3000 feet up--which is not cold, yet is so colourless, enclosed the earth. The sky was as bare of clouds as the common of landmarks; the one lay palely blue above, the other stretched subduedly green below. Here and there the green was crossed by long flushes of colour, with the red of tiny tiger-lilies, and the pale yellow of the evening primrose. Behind, Lord Fuji rose majestic. At first a line of fleecy cloud had lain above the deep green of the forest, and Fuji’s head was lost in mist, but at the sunset the clouds fell away lower and lower, until the whole long sweep of Fuji rose up triumphant into the blue.

It was but slowly that the _basha_ jolted among the deep-cut ruts of the common, and but slowly that we travelled on, downwards.

Looking out across the wide flat land we saw that the whole world was slightly rounded, slightly tilted. It was like journeying over a large green apple. The globe in fact palpable, visibly rounded. Away on the left the sun was setting in straight streamers of pale red edged with shining gold. And the green common, with its pools of little red lilies, and its bands of pale yellow primroses, grew greyer and greyer.

Fuji San, perfect in long smooth curves, stood purple-blue behind. Clear-cut as a jewel in a setting he rose up, rose up, until the rounded strength of his summit lay bright sapphire on the azure sky.

* * * * *

Over the ruts the _basha_ stumbled, endlessly jolting.

The sun set slowly, and slowly the colours died. Grey lay the common in front of us, on each side. Lord Fuji was but a dark, still shadow. And over the ruts the _basha_ stumbled in long, slow jolts.

We were very tired, our backs ached with the jolting, and our arms were numb with pain. All around us the grey spaces of the common stretched uninterruptedly, without house or village. Where was Yoshida?

Still the _basha_ lumbered and stumbled, and we looked for lights and houses.

Nothing. Only in front of us the grey level of the common grew tall and black.... In a few more jolts the deep black had engulfed us, grey common and all, and we were wandering among dark shadows that were trees.

In the very pitch of the blackness the cart suddenly stopped. We were asked to get out. The _basha_ went no further.

“But Yoshida?”

“_Yoshida yoroshī!_--all right,” replied the man, unconcerned, as though every traveller to every town arrived in a dark wood without sight or sound of houses; and he drove off.

Our guide picked up the luggage, and we followed stumbling, straining our eyes to tell the deeper shadows that were trees from the paler dark that meant pathway.

Slowly the deeper shadows receded, and in their place came the dim forms of houses. Then a sharp turn and we were walking along a real road with the familiar knitting-needles of the Japanese tramway shining in the twilight. After a while the houses grew denser, and some of them had lights; but the contrast only made the pale dark of the open roadway seem still blacker.

Large trucks, like kitchen-tables with their legs cut short, came sliding past us as we stumbled on, gliding slowly down the road alone and unattached.

Parties of pilgrims in white, with white staves in their hands, came unexpectedly out of the darkness, and the lighted paper lanterns in their hands warmed their white clothes into a rich cream-yellow, precipitating them into solid bodies from the waist downward, while their heads and shoulders drifted slowly on through the pale night like impalpable ghosts.

We had reached the top of the hill, and the road, in a sudden turn, ran sharply away from us. The houses were on both sides now in one continuous line, and the shock of meeting trucks jarred through the street. There was a flare of orange light where the knitting-needles became a shunting-yard.

This was Yoshida.

Our landlady was aristocratic to her finger-tips. She had the long slim neck, the long thin face, with its pure outlines, the long narrow eyes, the long graceful body, and the delicate poise which is the ideal type of the aristocrat--and rare even among them. When she knelt on the matting to receive us, she did it with the distinction of a queen, and all her movements showed that clean-cut grace, that courtesy without effort, that refinement of pose and gesture which only the continued culture of long generations can produce, and which is to mere politeness or mere beauty as the subtle music of the poet to Monsieur Jourdain’s prose. Her husband was a bullet-headed man of the people, stubby and plebeian. His manners, like his Japanese, were polite of course, but undistinguished, while our hostess spoke a language as courtly as her ways. When she glided over the matting, her long sleeves swaying, or stretched out her thin slim-fingered hand to take our tea-cups, we felt like beings of a lower evolution, and this higher product, evolved by centuries of self-control and a living love of beauty, was the human form made perfect, to which we might, perhaps, one day attain.

Even the inn possessed something of her grace: the matting was whiter, the woodwork smoother, the steep stairway--set like a ladder between the walls--more polished than elsewhere. The tiny medallions set deep in the _shōji_, which are as the handles to our doors, were works of art. The miniature garden of the courtyard, with its hills and trees and swift grey stream, was a living landscape, perfect in form and colouring. Even the shallow brass pans in which we washed, the commonest of hotel furniture, had an elegance of their own. And in the refined and beautiful inn our graceful, courtly landlady knelt and offered us platefuls of “mixed biscuits.” They were certainly cheap ones, but never did the utter vulgarity of their shapes, or the crudeness of their colouring, strike so sharply on my senses. If they had tasted like manna from the wilderness I could not have eaten one. They were too ugly.

It is vivid still, the bliss of that hot bath in fresh mountain water pumped from a stream which comes from Fuji’s sacred slopes, and the joy of that long dreamless sleep under the green mosquito curtain in our white matted room. Vivid still, the breakfast cooked over the _hibachi_, with our aristocratic landlady, every line of her graceful form looking purer and more refined as she stooped to hold the handle of the frying-pan, while her stolid husband on his knees before his office desk in the corner looked on good-naturedly, and the stout little maid watched the foreign cooking of our ham as though it had been a sacred rite.

* * * * *

We were to return by the lakes which encircle Fuji, and we set out that morning along a dull dusty road between dull dusty banks.

It was but a little way to the first lake, but hot beyond believing, and when we reached it, and pushed out in our boat beyond the narrow inlet which ran deep into the road, the heat settled down like a roof above our heads.

The sky was one superb arch of azure blue; the earth in front of us a wide, bare flat, glittering with heat. And from out of that gleaming, quivering mist which hid the level land Great Fuji rose dark blue on blue. Naked and superb he stood against the background of the sky secure in his strength, perfect in his beauty, beyond words, beyond praise, in sober truth--divine.

It took an hour and a half to cross the lake, and all the time Fuji San, set in the framework of the turquoise sky, with the gleaming, glittering mist of light sweeping like an iridescent cloud to the edge of his dark blue slope, stayed with us. For an hour and a half we looked, and the form and the soul of the mountain sank deep within our hearts.

* * * * *

The second lake is divided from the first by a natural wall of hill over which we climbed, the sun striking fiercely on the pathway where one small patch of shade lay black on the thick white dust.

The second lake was set deep within the circle of the hills, and we crossed it in company with three men who had drunk much _saké_, and another who stuck fuses into a row of dynamite cartridges and then, leaving them under a corner of the matting in the bottom of the boat, apparently forgot their existence. These four passengers and the two boatmen were continually stumbling up and down the boat to row in turns, and always within a few inches of the dynamite.

It was a somewhat agitating row, although we were assured the cartridges were “only for fishing.”

It ended at last, after a long two hours of suspense, among the quiet grey boulders which stretched for a hundred yards between the water and the wood.

Down the little valley beyond the stones, a winding river of rice-fields ran like a grass-green stream, and we followed it, as one follows up a mountain brook, till it dwindled and disappeared. Then the wood closed in above it, and we were in the middle of a weird uncanny forest, all grey and wrinkled, where multitudes of thick-set pole-like trees, covered with a powdery dust, ranged ghost-like out of sight.

And here we walked, the only living things in a spell-bound world, walked until the earth grew thin beneath our feet and the rough grey boulders came up through the soil.

Then for a long, long while we went beside a grey lava-river flowing between the grey tree-stems, a wide and furious river arrested as it swept in angry tumult through the wood, stopped dead, and each breaking wave turned into stone. We looked at this still, dead river and saw how the years had covered the waves with a thick white crust of dust. Buried deep lay that tempest of passion which once had swept burning from Fuji’s sides, buried deep beneath blocks of grey lava and the drifting ash-grey dust.

Yet the very stones that buried it were carved in its image. And the face of that passion, petrified and deadly, looked up from the river. And all around the grey wood stood dead too, and very still, coated deep with a powdery dust, ash-grey. For the spell of the river was over the wood, and it was the death of Destruction.

For miles we walked beside that Medusa river, sometimes we left it, sometimes we crossed it, then losing it between the trees we wandered where the ghostly pole-like trunks grew thickest. But always the river came back with the dead passion that made it staring rigid beneath the stones.

Miles and miles of lava, wide, and long, and deep. The ghostly trees were rooted in it, the very lakes lay cradled in it, the world for far around was made of it. Verily the fires of Fuji San were mighty in those days.

* * * * *

The third lake was black, ink-black, black as strong-cast shadows in the moonlight. Tarnished and still it lay, without a glitter or a gleam; yet the washing wavelets, as they poured over the stone at our feet, were pure and clear, and the high steep hills that half encircled it were dense with the greenest trees.

The ghostly wood was ended, the petrified river gone; on the banks of this sombre lake living trees were growing. Tangled and thick and high, they walled in three sides of the lake, and, sweeping round in a long thin promontory, divided the ink-black waters with a sword of green.

Along the hill there ran no pathway, the trees stood too thick, the hill too steep. There was no boat upon the lake nor any road around it. The black waters washed to the foot of the trees, the trees stretched green to the top of the hills, and lake and wood were still as undiscovered country.

And behind us lay all the long silence of the ghostly wood.

On the very edge of the promontory a white house rested, poised like a gull on the water, but the dead-black lake gave back no reflection, and the dark-green hills caught no colour from the sun, nor stirred a leaf. Silent as the waters the house poised white beneath the evening sky.

On three sides the high hills shut in the lake, but on the fourth the lava-stones met the marsh, the marsh the common, and wide and flat the common stretched away to the beyond.

A little while and the setting sun was down behind the hills, and all the sky was darkening into night. Far over the common, and purple as a king’s raiment, rose Fuji San. Grand and lonely he stood between dark earth and darkening sky; far off on the edge of the world, and all the solemn stillness of the evening wrapt him round.

Gently fell the twilight on lake and hill. The grey spaces of the common stretched more vast and wide. The night was coming fast.

Beneath my feet the blackness of the waters opened as the deep abyss. Behind, the horror of the spell-bound wood waited wide-eyed. Sweeping onwards in the twilight the indistinctness of the common passed out of sight, the pathless hills closed round me.

Then the spell of the ghostly wood reached out to clutch. I looked towards the light.... Dim as Life’s hope it lay, far off beyond the horizon, while all the blackness of the lake and hill surrounded me.

I strained my eyes across the indistinctness, and from that far-off heaven a lofty Presence leaned.

It was the Great God Fuji.

III

EPILOGUE

The blue sea lies sleeping warm and still; the sky, another sea, sleeps too; only the green headlands standing between blue and blue watch, their feet in the water. And the heat is the heat of a summer’s noon.

So still the sea, so quiet the sky, so calm the earth that the soft breath of the sleeping ocean comes as a rippling sigh towards the land, while the blue sea above floats lazy.

From their low hill Tesshuji’s forsaken Gods look out. The temple walls are bare, its altars dumb, and the grass-grown court has shod even silence with a velvet shoe. Dreaming, the Gods sit undisturbed, and the hush of the noonday’s heat is deepened.

It is long since the clang of the praying-bell overhead called them to listen. Still they sit, and look.

In the shadow of the doorway at the still Gods’ feet, I, too, sit and look.