What is hereafter set down consists of notes taken on the journey, but afterwards amended and expanded—for notes made while climbing are necessarily hurried and imperfect.
I
August 24th, 1897.
From strings stretched above the balcony upon which my inn-room opens, hundreds of towels are hung like flags—blue towels and white, having printed upon them in Chinese characters the names of pilgrim-companies and of the divinity of Fuji. These are gifts to the house, and serve as advertisements. … Raining from a uniformly grey sky. Fuji always invisible.
August 25th.
3:30 a. m.—No sleep;—tumult all night of parties returning late from the mountain, or arriving for the pilgrimage;—constant clapping of hands to summon servants;—banqueting and singing in the adjoining chambers, with alarming bursts of laughter every few minutes. … Breakfast of soup, fish, and rice. Gōriki arrive in professional costume, and find me ready. Nevertheless they insist that I shall undress again and put on heavy underclothing;—warning me that even when it is Doyō (the period of greatest summer heat) at the foot of the mountain, it is Daikan (the period of greatest winter cold) at the top. Then they start in advance, carrying provisions and bundles of heavy clothing. … A kuruma waits for me, with three runners—two to pull, and one to push, as the work will be hard uphill. By kuruma I can go to the height of five thousand feet.
Morning black and slightly chill, with fine rain; but I shall soon be above the rain-clouds. … The lights of the town vanish behind us;—the kuruma is rolling along a country-road. Outside of the swinging penumbra made by the paper-lantern of the foremost runner, nothing is clearly visible; but I can vaguely distinguish silhouettes of trees and, from time to time, of houses—peasants’ houses with steep roofs.
Grey wan light slowly suffuses the moist air;—day is dawning through drizzle. … Gradually the landscape defines with its colors. The way lies through thin woods. Occasionally we pass houses with high thatched roofs that look like farmhouses; but cultivated land is nowhere visible. …
Open country with scattered clumps of trees—larch and pine. Nothing in the horizon but scraggy tree-tops above what seems to be the rim of a vast down. No sign whatever of Fuji. … For the first time I notice that the road is black—black sand and cinders apparently, volcanic cinders: the wheels of the kuruma and the feet of the runners sink into it with a crunching sound.
The rain has stopped, and the sky becomes a clearer grey. … The trees decrease in size and number as we advance.
What I have been taking for the horizon, in front of us, suddenly breaks open, and begins to roll smokily away to left and right. In the great rift part of a dark-blue mass appears—a portion of Fuji. Almost at the same moment the sun pierces the clouds behind us; but the road now enters a copse covering the base of a low ridge, and the view is cut off. … Halt at a little house among the trees—a pilgrims’ resting-place—and there find the gōriki, who have advanced much more rapidly than my runners, waiting for us. Buy eggs, which a gōriki rolls up in a narrow strip of straw matting;—tying the matting tightly with straw cord between the eggs—so that the string of eggs has somewhat the appearance of a string of sausages. … Hire a horse.
Sky clears as we proceed;—white sunlight floods everything. Road reascends; and we emerge again on the moorland. And, right in front, Fuji appears—naked to the summit—stupendous—startling as if newly risen from the earth. Nothing could be more beautiful. A vast blue cone—warm-blue, almost violet through the vapors not yet lifted by the sun—with two white streaklets near the top which are great gullies full of snow, though they look from here scarcely an inch long. But the charm of the apparition is much less the charm of color than of symmetry—a symmetry of beautiful bending lines with a curve like the curve of a cable stretched over a space too wide to allow of pulling taut. (This comparison did not at once suggest itself: The first impression given me by the grace of those lines was an impression of femininity;—I found myself thinking of some exquisite sloping of shoulders towards the neck.) I can imagine nothing more difficult to draw at sight. But the Japanese artist, through his marvellous skill with the writing-brush—the skill inherited from generations of calligraphists—easily faces the riddle: he outlines the silhouette with two flowing strokes made in the fraction of a second, and manages to hit the exact truth of the curves—much as a professional archer might hit a mark, without consciously taking aim, through long exact habit of hand and eye.
II
I see the gōriki hurrying forward far away—one of them carrying the eggs round his neck! … Now there are no more trees worthy of the name—only scattered stunted growths resembling shrubs. The black road curves across a vast grassy down; and here and there I see large black patches in the green surface—bare spaces of ashes and scoriæ; showing that this thin green skin covers some enormous volcanic deposit of recent date. … As a matter of history, all this district was buried two yards deep in 1707 by an eruption from the side of Fuji. Even in far-off Tōkyō the rain of ashes covered roofs to a depth of sixteen centimetres. There are no farms in this region, because there is little true soil; and there is no water. But volcanic destruction is not eternal destruction; eruptions at last prove fertilizing; and the divine “Princess-who-causes-the-flowers-to-blossom-brightly” will make this waste to smile again in future hundreds of years.
… The black openings in the green surface become more numerous and larger. A few dwarf-shrubs still mingle with the coarse grass. … The vapors are lifting; and Fuji is changing color. It is no longer a glowing blue, but a dead sombre blue. Irregularities previously hidden by rising ground appear in the lower part of the grand curves. One of these to the left—shaped like a camel’s hump—represents the focus of the last great eruption.
The land is not now green with black patches, but black with green patches; and the green patches dwindle visibly in the direction of the peak. The shrubby growths have disappeared. The wheels of the kuruma, and the feet of the runners sink deeper into the volcanic sand. … The horse is now attached to the kuruma with ropes, and I am able to advance more rapidly. Still the mountain seems far away; but we are really running up its flank at a height of more than five thousand feet.
Fuji has ceased to be blue of any shade. It is black—charcoal-black—a frightful extinct heap of visible ashes and cinders and slaggy lava. … Most of the green has disappeared. Likewise all of the illusion. The tremendous naked black reality—always becoming more sharply, more grimly, more atrociously defined—is a stupefaction, a nightmare. … Above—miles above—the snow patches glare and gleam against that blackness—hideously. I think of a gleam of white teeth I once saw in a skull—a woman’s skull—otherwise burnt to a sooty crisp.
So one of the fairest, if not the fairest of earthly visions, resolves itself into a spectacle of horror and death. … But have not all human ideals of beauty, like the beauty of Fuji seen from afar, been created by forces of death and pain?—are not all, in their kind, but composites of death, beheld in retrospective through the magical haze of inherited memory?
III
The green has utterly vanished;—all is black. There is no road—only the broad waste of black sand sloping and narrowing up to those dazzling, grinning patches of snow. But there is a track—a yellowish track made by thousands and thousands of cast-off sandals of straw (waraji), flung aside by pilgrims. Straw sandals quickly wear out upon this black grit; and every pilgrim carries several pair for the journey. Had I to make the ascent alone, I could find the path by following that wake of broken sandals—a yellow streak zigzagging up out of sight across the blackness.
6:40 a. m.—We reach Tarōbō, first of the ten stations on the ascent: