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: height, 6000 feet. The station is a large wooden house, of which two rooms have been fitted up as a shop for the sale of staves, hats, raincoats, sandals,—everything pilgrims need. I find there a peripatetic photographer offering for sale photographs of the mountain which are really very good as well as very cheap.... Here the gōriki take their first meal; and I rest. The kuruma can go no further; and I dismiss my three runners, but keep the horse,—a docile and surefooted creature; for I can venture to ride him up to Ni-gō-goséki, or Station No. 2½.
Start for No. 2½ up the slant of black sand, keeping the horse at a walk. No. 2½ is shut up for the season.... Slope now becomes steep as a stairway, and further riding would be dangerous. Alight and make ready for the climb. Cold wind blowing so strongly that I have to tie on my hat tightly. One of the gōriki unwinds from about his waist a long stout cotton girdle, and giving me one end to hold, passes the other over his shoulder for the pull. Then he proceeds over the sand at an angle, with a steady short step, and I follow; the other guide keeping closely behind me to provide against any slip.
There is nothing very difficult about this climbing, except the weariness of walking through sand and cinders: it is like walking over dunes.... We mount by zigzags. The sand moves with the wind; and I have a slightly nervous sense—the feeling only, not the perception; for I keep my eyes on the sand,—of height growing above depth.... Have to watch my steps carefully, and to use my staff constantly, as the slant is now very steep.... We are in a white fog,—passing through clouds! Even if I wished to look back, I could see nothing through this vapor; but I have not the least wish to look back. The wind has suddenly ceased—cut off, perhaps, by a ridge; and there is a silence that I remember from West Indian days: the Peace of High Places. It is broken only by the crunching of the ashes beneath our feet. I can distinctly hear my heart beat.... The guide tells me that I stoop too much,—orders me to walk upright, and always in stepping to put down the heel first. I do this, and find it relieving. But climbing through this tiresome mixture of ashes and sand begins to be trying. I am perspiring and panting. The guide bids me keep my honorable mouth closed, and breathe only through my honorable nose.
We are out of the fog again.... All at once I perceive above us, at a little distance, something like a square hole in the face of the mountain,—a door! It is the door of the third station,—a wooden hut half-buried in black drift.... How delightful to squat again,—even in a blue cloud of wood-smoke and under smoke-blackened rafters! Time, 8:30 a. m. Height, 7,085 feet.
In spite of the wood-smoke the station is comfortable enough inside; there are clean mattings and even kneeling-cushions. No windows, of course, nor any other opening than the door; for the building is half-buried in the flank of the mountain. We lunch.... The station-keeper tells us that recently a student walked from Gotemba to the top of the mountain and back again—in geta! Geta are heavy wooden sandals, or clogs, held to the foot only by a thong passing between the great and the second toe. The feet of that student must have been made of steel!