But at daybreak it was a sea of mist into which it looked as if one might plunge, naked to the skin and wash his soul clean of its tropical sweat and dirt; a fit swimming pool for the gods of Java, of whom there are so many.
Then something happened as we stood looking down into that smooth sea of white fog, rolling in great billows below us. There was a sudden roar as if an entire Hindenburg line had let loose with its "Heavies." There was a sudden and terrific trembling of the earth under our feet which made us jump back from that precipice in terror.
Then slowly, as if it were on a great mechanical stage, the perfect cone of old rumbling Bromo, from which curled a thin wisp of black smoke, bulged its way out of the center of that sea of white fog, rising gradually higher and higher as though the stage of the morning had been set, the play had begun, and unseen stage hands behind the curtain of fog, with some mighty derrick and tremendous power were lifting a huge volcano as a stage piece.
Then came the quick, burning tropical sun, shooting above the eastern horizon as suddenly as the volcanic cone had been lifted above the fog. This hot sun burned away the mists in a few minutes and there, stretching below us, in all its oriental beauty was the sinewy, voluptuous form of the silver sand sea—Bromo's subtle mistress.
* * * * * *
There is another Physical Flash-light that will never die.
Coming out of the Singapore Straits one evening at sunset, bound for the island of Borneo across the South China Sea, I was sitting on the upper deck of a small Dutch ship. The canvas flapped in the winds. A cool, tropical breeze fanned our faces. Back of us in our direct wake a splashing, tumbling, tumultuous tropical sunset flared across the sky. It was crimson glory. In the direct path of the crimson sun a lighthouse flashed its blinking eyes like a musical director with his baton beating time.
I watched this flashing, lesser, light against the crimson sunset and was becoming fascinated by it.
Then great black clouds began to roll down over that crimson background as if they were huge curtains, rolled down from above, to change the setting of the western stage for another act.
But as they rolled they formed strange and beautiful Doric columns against the crimson skies and before I knew it, I was looking at the ruins of an old Greek temple in the sky. Then the black clouds formed a perfect hour-glass reaching from the sea to the sky, with its background of crimson glory, and the little lighthouse seemed to be flashing off the minutes in the arteries of that hour-glass.
And then it was night a deep, dense, tropical night; heavy with darkness; rich with perfume; weird with mystery. But the sunset of crimson; the Doric temple in ruins; the hour-glass; and the flashing lighthouse still remained.
* * * * * *
And who shall ever forget the sunsets of gold across Manila Bay night after night; with great warships and majestic steamers, sleek and slender cutters, white sails, long reaching docks, and graceful Filipino women, silhouetted against the gold? And who shall forget the domes, towers, and pinnacles of the Cathedrals; and the old fort within the city walls as they too were silhouetted against the gold of the evening?
* * * * * *
Mt. Taishan, the oldest worshiping place on earth, not far from the birthplace of Confucius; in Shantung; is one of the most sacred shrines of the Orient. There, countless millions, for hundreds of centuries, have climbed over six thousand granite steps, up its mile high slope to pay their vows; to catch a view of the blue sea from its imminence; to feel the sweep, wonder and glory of its sublime height, knowing that Confucius himself gloried in this climb. The exaltation of that glorious view; shall live, side by side, with the view from the top of the Black Diamond range in Korea one winter's night as we caught the full sweep of the Japan Sea by sunset. In fact these all shall live as great mountain top Physical Flash-Lights etched with the acid of a burning wonder into one's soul!
Nor shall one ever forget a month's communion with Fujiyama, that solitary, great and worshiped mountain of Japan; sacred as a shrine; beautiful with snow; graceful as a Japanese woman's curving cheek; bronzed by summer; belted with crimson clouds by sunset like a Japanese woman's Obie. It, too, presented its unforgettable Physical Flash-Lights.
The first glimpse was one of untold spun-gold glory. There it stood.
"There it is! There it is! Look!" a fellow traveler cried.
"There is what?" I called. We were on top of a great American College building in Tokyo.
"It's Fuji!"
I had given up hope. We had been there two weeks and Fujiyama was not to be seen. The mists, fogs, and clouds of winter had kept it hidden from our wistful, wondering, waiting eyes.
But there it stood, like a naked man, unashamed; proud of its white form; without a single cloud; burning in the white sunlight. Its huge shoulders were thrown back as with suppressed strength. Its white chest, a Walt Whitman hairy with age; gray-breasted with snow; bulged out like some mighty wrestler, challenging the world. No wonder they worship it!
I had gloried in Fujiyama from many a varied viewpoint. I had caught this great shrine of Japanese devotion in many of its numberless moods. I had seen it outlined against a clear-cut morning sunlight, bathed in the glory of a broadside of light fired from the open muzzle of the sun. I had seen it shrouded in white clouds; and also with black clouds breeding a storm, at even-time. I had seen it with a crown of white upon its brow, and I had seen it with a necklace of white cloud pearls about its neck.
Once I saw this great mountain looking like some ominous volcano through a misty gray winter evening. And one mid-afternoon I saw it almost circled by a misty rainbow, a sight never to be forgotten on earth or in heaven by one whose soul considers a banquet of beauty more worth shouting over than an invitation to feast with a King.
But the last sight I caught of Fuji was the last night that I was in Tokyo, as I rode up from the Ginza on New Year's eve out toward Aoyama Gakuin, straight into a sunset, unsung, unseen by mortal eye.
Before me loomed the great mountain like a monstrous mass of mighty ebony carved by some delicate and yet gigantic artist's hand.
I soon discovered where the artist got the ebony from which to carve this pointed mountain of ebony with its flat top; for far above this black silhouetted mountain was a mass of ebony clouds that seemed to spread from the western horizon clear to the rim of the eastern horizon and beyond into the unseen Sea of Japan in the back yard of the island. It was from this mass of coal-black midnight-black clouds that the giant artist carved his ebony Fuji that night.
But not all was black. Perhaps the giant forged that mountain rather than carved it, for there was a blazing furnace behind Fuji. And this furnace was belching fire. It was not crimson. It was not gold. It was not red. It was fire.
It was furnace fire. It was a Pittsburgh blast-furnace ten thousand times as big as all of Pittsburgh itself, belching fire and flames of sparks. These sparks were flung against the evening skies. Some folks, I fancy, on that memorable night called them stars; but I know better. They were giant sparks flung from that blast-furnace which was booming and roaring behind Fuji. I could not hear it roar; that is true; but I could feel it roar. I could not hear it because even so great a sound as that furnace must have been making will not travel sixty miles, even though it was as still up there in the old theological tower as a country cemetery by winter down in Rhode Island when the snow covers the graves.
Then suddenly a flare of fire shot up directly behind the cone of Fuji, flaming into the coal-bank of clouds above the mountain, as if the old shaggy seer had forgotten his age and was dreaming of youth again when the earth was young and he was a volcano.
Above that