to stand upon: loose stones and cinders roll down at every step.... If a big lava-block were to detach itself from above!... In spite of my helpers and of the staff, I continually slip, and am all in perspiration again. Almost every stone that I tread upon turns under me. How is it that no stone ever turns under the feet of the gōriki? They never slip,—never make a false step,—never seem less at ease than they would be in walking over a matted floor. Their small brown broad feet always poise upon the shingle at exactly the right angle. They are heavier men than I; but they move lightly as birds.... Now I have to stop for rest every half-a-dozen steps.... The line of broken straw sandals follows the zigzags we take.... At last—at last another door in the face of the mountain. Enter the fourth station, and fling myself down upon the mats. Time, 10:30 a. m. Height, only 7,937 feet;—yet it seemed such a distance!

Off again.... Way worse and worse.... Feel a new distress due to the rarefaction of the air. Heart beating as in a high fever.... Slope has become very rough. It is no longer soft ashes and sand mixed with stones, but stones only,—fragments of lava, lumps of pumice, scoriæ of every sort, all angled as if freshly broken with a hammer. All would likewise seem to have been expressly shaped so as to turn upside-down when trodden upon. Yet I must confess that they never turn under the feet of the gōriki.... The cast-off sandals strew the slope in ever-increasing numbers.... But for the gōriki I should have had ever so many bad tumbles: they cannot prevent me from slipping; but they never allow me to fall. Evidently I am not fitted to climb mountains.... Height, 8,659 feet—but the fifth station is shut up! Must keep zigzaging on to the next. Wonder how I shall ever be able to reach it!... And there are people still alive who have climbed Fuji three and four times, for pleasure!... Dare not look back. See nothing but the black stones always turning under me, and the bronzed feet of those marvellous gōriki who never slip, never pant, and never perspire.... Staff begins to hurt my hand.... Gōriki push and pull: it is shameful of me, I know, to give them so much trouble.... Ah! sixth station!—may all the myriads of the gods bless my gōriki! Time, 2:07 p. m. Height, 9,317 feet.

Resting, I gaze through the doorway at the abyss below. The land is now dimly visible only through rents in a prodigious wilderness of white clouds; and within these rents everything looks almost black.... The horizon has risen frightfully,—has expanded monstrously.... My gōriki warn me that the summit is still miles away. I have been too slow. We must hasten upward.

Certainly the zigzag is steeper than before.... With the stones now mingle angular rocks; and we sometimes have to flank queer black bulks that look like basalt.... On the right rises, out of sight, a jagged black hideous ridge,—an ancient lava-stream. The line of the left slope still shoots up, straight as a bow-string.... Wonder if the way will become any steeper;—doubt whether it can possibly become any rougher. Rocks dislodged by my feet roll down soundlessly;—I am afraid to look after them. Their noiseless vanishing gives me a sensation like the sensation of falling in dreams....

There is a white gleam overhead—the lowermost verge of an immense stretch of snow.... Now we are skirting a snow-filled gully,—the lowermost of those white patches which, at first sight of the summit this morning, seemed scarcely an inch long. It will take an hour to pass it.... A guide runs forward, while I rest upon my staff, and returns with a large ball of snow. What curious snow! Not flaky, soft, white snow, but a mass of transparent globules,—exactly like glass beads. I eat some, and find it deliciously refreshing.... The seventh station is closed. How shall I get to the eighth?... Happily, breathing has become less difficult.... The wind is upon us again, and black dust with it. The gōriki keep close to me, and advance with caution.... I have to stop for rest at every turn on the path;—cannot talk for weariness.... I do not feel;—I am much too tired to feel.... How I managed it, I do not know;—but I have actually got to the eighth station! Not for a thousand millions of dollars will I go one step further to-day. Time, 4:40 p. m. Height, 10,693 feet.

V

It is much too cold here for rest without winter clothing; and now I learn the worth of the heavy robes provided by the guides. The robes are blue, with big white Chinese characters on the back, and are padded thickly as bedquilts; but they feel light; for the air is really like the frosty breath of February.... A meal is preparing;—I notice that charcoal at this elevation acts in a refractory manner, and that a fire can be maintained only by constant attention.... Cold and fatigue sharpen appetite: we consume a surprising quantity of Zō-sui,—rice boiled with eggs and a little meat. By reason of my fatigue and of the hour, it has been decided to remain here for the night.

Tired as I am, I cannot but limp to the doorway to contemplate the amazing prospect. From within a few feet of the threshold, the ghastly slope of rocks and cinders drops down into a prodigious disk of clouds miles beneath us,—clouds of countless forms, but mostly wreathings and fluffy pilings;—and the whole huddling mass, reaching almost to the horizon, is blinding white under the sun. (By the Japanese, this tremendous cloud-expanse is well named Wata-no-Umi, “the Sea of Cotton.”) The horizon itself—enormously risen, phantasmally expanded—seems halfway up above the world: a wide luminous belt ringing the hollow vision. Hollow, I call it, because extreme distances below the sky-line are sky-colored and vague,—so that the impression you receive is not of being on a point under a vault, but of being upon a point rising into a stupendous blue sphere, of which this huge horizon would represent the equatorial zone. To turn away from such a spectacle is not possible. I watch and watch until the dropping sun changes the colors,—turning the Sea of Cotton into a Fleece of Gold. Half-round the horizon a yellow glory grows and burns. Here and there beneath it, through cloudrifts, colored vaguenesses define: I now see golden water, with long purple headlands reaching into it, with ranges of violet peaks thronging behind it;—these glimpses curiously resembling portions of a tinted topographical map. Yet most of the landscape is pure delusion. Even my guides, with their long experience and their eagle-sight, can scarcely distinguish the real from the unreal;—for the blue and purple and violet clouds moving under the Golden Fleece, exactly mock the outlines and the tones of distant peaks and capes: you can detect what is vapor only by its slowly shifting shape.... Brighter and brighter glows the gold. Shadows come from the west,—shadows flung by cloud-pile over cloud-pile; and these, like evening shadows upon snow, are violaceous blue.... Then orange-tones appear in the horizon; then smouldering crimson. And now the greater part of the Fleece of Gold has changed to cotton again,—white cotton mixed with pink.... Stars thrill out. The cloud-waste uniformly whitens;—thickening and packing to the horizon. The west glooms. Night rises; and all things darken except that wondrous unbroken world-round of white,—the Sea of Cotton.

The station-keeper lights his lamps, kindles a fire of twigs, prepares our beds. Outside it is bitterly cold, and, with the fall of night, becoming colder. Still I cannot