Exotics and Retrospectives. Lafcadio Hearn

where I have been summering—the merest pin-point in that tinted dream of hill and shore. Rivers appear but as sun-gleams on spider-threads;—fishing-sails are white dust clinging to the grey-blue glass of the sea. And the picture alternately appears and vanishes while the clouds drift and shift across it, and shape themselves into spectral islands and mountains and valleys of all Elysian colors. …

      VII

      6:40 a. m.—Start for the top. … Hardest and roughest stage of the journey, through a wilderness of lava-blocks. The path zigzags between ugly masses that project from the slope like black teeth. The trail of cast-away sandals is wider than ever. … Have to rest every few minutes. … Reach another long patch of the snow that looks like glass-beads, and eat some. The next station—a half-station—is closed; and the ninth has ceased to exist. … A sudden fear comes to me, not of the ascent, but of the prospective descent by a route which is too steep even to permit of comfortably sitting down. But the guides assure me that there will be no difficulty, and that most of the return-journey will be by another way—over the interminable level which I wondered at yesterday—nearly all soft sand, with very few stones. It is called the hashiri (“glissade”); and we are to descend at a run! …

      All at once a family of field-mice scatter out from under my feet in panic; and the gōriki behind me catches one, and gives it to me. I hold the tiny shivering life for a moment to examine it, and set it free again. These little creatures have very long pale noses. How do they live in this waterless desolation—and at such an altitude—especially in the season of snow? For we are now at a height of more than eleven thousand feet! The gōriki say that the mice find roots growing under the stones. …

      Wilder and steeper;—for me, at least, the climbing is sometimes on all fours. There are barriers which we surmount with the help of ladders. There are fearful places with Buddhist names, such as the Sai-no-Kawara, or Dry Bed of the River of Souls—a black waste strewn with heaps of rock, like those stone-piles which, in Buddhist pictures of the underworld, the ghosts of children build. …

      Twelve thousand feet, and something—the top! Time, 8:20 a. m. … Stone huts; Shintō shrine with tōrii; icy well, called the Spring of Gold; stone tablet bearing a Chinese poem and the design of a tiger; rough walls of lava-blocks round these things—possibly for protection against the wind. Then the huge dead crater—probably between a quarter of a mile and half-a-mile wide, but shallowed up to within three or four hundred feet of the verge by volcanic detritus—a cavity horrible even in the tones of its yellow crumbling walls, streaked and stained with every hue of scorching. I perceive that the trail of straw sandals ends in the crater. Some hideous over-hanging cusps of black lava—like the broken edges of a monstrous cicatrix—project on two sides several hundred feet above the opening; but I certainly shall not take the trouble to climb them. Yet these—seen through the haze of a hundred miles—through the soft illusion of blue spring-weather—appear as the opening snowy petals of the bud of the Sacred Lotos! … No spot in this world can be more horrible, more atrociously dismal, than the cindered tip of the Lotos as you stand upon it.

      But the view—the view for a hundred leagues—and the light of the far faint dreamy world—and the fairy vapors of morning—and the marvellous wreathings of cloud: all this, and only this, consoles me for the labor and the pain. … Other pilgrims, earlier climbers—poised upon the highest crag, with faces turned to the tremendous East—are clapping their hands in Shintō prayer, saluting the mighty Day. … The immense poetry of the moment enters into me with a thrill. I know that the colossal vision before me has already become a memory ineffaceable—a memory of which no luminous detail can fade till the hour when thought itself must fade, and the dust of these eyes be mingled with the dust of the myriad million eyes that also have looked, in ages forgotten before my birth, from the summit supreme of Fuji to the Rising of the Sun.

Insect-Musicians

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