# Jinrikisha Days in Japan/Chapter 18
### CHAPTER XVIII THE DESCENT OF FUJIYAMA

From Saturday until Tuesday, three endless days and as many nights, the whirling storm kept us prisoners in the dark, smoke-filled rest-house. What had been the amusing incidents of one stormy night became our intolerable routine of life. Escape was impossible, even for the hardy mountaineers and pilgrims at the other end of the hut, and to unbar the door for a momentary outlook threatened the demolition of the shelter. A tempest at sea was not more awful in its fury, but our ears became finally accustomed to the roar and hiss of the wind, and the persistent blows it dealt the structure. The grave problem of provisioning the place in time confronted us, and after our one day’s luncheon was exhausted, it became a question how long the master of the station could provide even fish and rice for forty people.
The two boys, or valets, brought by their sybarite masters, like all Japanese servants out of their grooves, ​were utterly helpless, and lay supine in their corners, covered, head and all, with futons. The altitude, the cold, or the dilemma paralyzed their usually nimble faculties, and our coolies were far more useful. We could not stand upright under the heavy beams of the roof, and as the floor planks had been taken up here and there to brace the doors with, walking was difficult in that dark abode. While we grew impatient in our cage, the four little naval cadets sat, or lay, quietly in their futons, hour after hour, talking as cheerfully as if the sun were shining, their prospects hopeful, and their summer suits of white duck designed for the Eighth Station’s phenomenal climate. Throughout our incarceration the coolies dozed and waked under their futons, sitting up only long enough to eat, or play some childish game, and dropping back to reckon how much per diem would accrue to them without an equivalent of work. When we found that the smoky fireplace offered some warmth, we sat around the sunken box with our feet in the ashes and handkerchiefs to our eyes to keep out the blinding smoke.
In that intimate circle we learned the cook’s secrets, and watched him shaving off his billets of dried fish with a plane, stewing them with mushrooms and seasoning with soy and saké. This compound we found so good that our flattered landlord brought out hot saké and insisted on an exchange of healths. We noticed that in the midst of this hospitality he went and made some offering or other at his little household altar, and, writing something in a book, returned more benign and friendly than ever. The preparation of red bean and barley soups, two sweetened messes that only a Japanese could eat, and the boiling of rice seemed never to stop. Twice a day the big copper caldron was set on its stone frame half full of boiling water. When it bubbled most furiously over a brushwood fire, a basketful of freshly washed and soaked rice was poured in. In a half-hour the ​caldron was filled to the top with the full, snowy grains, ready for the chopsticks of the waiting company.
Each night the master of the hut prophesied clear weather at five o’clock in the morning, and each morning he prophesied clear weather for five o’clock in the afternoon, but the wind howled, the sleet swept by in clouds, and hail rattled noisily on roof and walls. The second afternoon the master of the summit rest-hut appeared at the window, and, more dead than alive, was drawn in by the excited coolies, who helped chafe his limbs and pour cups of hot saké between his lips. The story of his battle with the storm on the open, wind-swept cone satisfied us all to wait for the clearing. An empty rice-box had forced him to attempt the journey to revictual his station, and we wondered how soon our landlord would be compelled to the same desperate effort.
On the third morning the visiting boniface and four wood-choppers decided to attempt the descent, and when the door was unbarred, the pale daylight and a changed wind, that entered the dim cave where we had been imprisoned, foretold a clearing sky. As the clouds lifted, we could see for miles down the wet and glistening mountain to a broad, green plain, sparkling with flashing diamonds of lakes, and gaze down a sheer ten thousand feet to the level of the sea. It was a view worth the three days of waiting. The summit loomed clear and close at hand, and our western mountaineers made two thousand feet of ascent in thirty minutes, the rest of us following in a more deliberate procession, as befitted the altitude. The coolies, in bright yellow oil-paper capes and hats, trooped after us like a flock of canaries, gayly decorating the dark lava paths. At the edge of the summit, on the rim of the crater, we passed under a torii, climbed steep lava steps and entered the last station—a low, dark, wretched, little wind-swept ​cabin, with one small door and a ten-inch fireplace, where saké was warming for us.
Hardly had we arrived when the wind rose, the clouds shut down, and again the rain drove in dense and whirling sheets. The adventurous ones, who had pushed on to the edge of the crater to look in, were obliged to creep back to safety on their hands and knees, for fear of being swept over into that cauldron of boiling clouds and mist. It was no time to make the circuit of the crater’s rim with its many shrines, or descend the path-way, guarded by torii, to the crater’s bed. We hurried through the formalities at the temple, where the benumbed priest branded the alpenstocks, stamped our handkerchiefs and clothing, and gave us pictured certificates of our ascent to that point. Then began a wild sliding and plunging down a shoot of loose cinders to Station Number Eight, where the landlord produced a book and read our three-days’ board bill from a record of many pages. Everything was chanted out by items, even to the saké and mushrooms that had been pressed upon us as a courtesy, and it was only after many appeals for the sum total that he instinctively ducked his head and named fifty-eight dollars for the seven of us. Then ensued a deafening attack of remonstrances from men and valets, threats and invectives in Japanese and English, lasting until the inn-keeping Shylock agreed to take thirty dollars, received this moiety cheerfully, and bade us adieu with many protestations of esteem.
Rubber and gossamer rain-cloaks were worse than useless in that whirlwind, and haste was our one necessity. Dress skirts were sodden and leaden masses, and mine being hung as an offering to Fuji-san, a red Navajo blanket replaced it, and enveloped me completely. A yellow-clad coolie securely fastened his rope, and we slipped, and plunged, and rolled down a shoot of loose cinders. Sinking ankle-deep, we travelled as if on ​runners through the wet ashes, sliding down in minutes stretches that it had taken us as many hours to ascend, and stopping only at one or two rest-houses for cups of hot tea, while we staggered and stumbled on through rain that came ever harder and faster.
At Umagayeshi, where the dripping party waited for more tea, the sun came gayly out and seemed to laugh at our plight. The sudden warmth, the greenhouse steam and softness, were most grateful to us after our hardships in the clouds. At Subashiri we put on the few dry garments we had been fortunate enough to leave behind us. The tea-house windows framed vignettes of Fuji, a clear blue and purple cone in a radiant, cloud-dappled sky. With the prospect of a hot day to follow, it was decided to push on to Miyanoshita, travelling all night, the kagos being as comfortable as the flea-infested tea-house, and the men of our party being obliged to walk on until they reached dry boots and clothes. Though the coolies grumbled, stormed, and appealed, they had enjoyed three days of absolute rest and full pay at Number Eight, and the walk of forty-five miles, from the summit to Miyanoshita, is not an unusual jaunt for them to make.
At Gotemba’s tea-house we found our companions in misfortune—the little midshipmen—whom we joined in feasting on what the house could offer. The old women in attendance, yellow and wrinkled as the crones of ivory netsukes, were vastly interested in our Fuji experiences and dilapidated costumes, and gave us rice, fish, sponge-cake, tea, and saké. At midnight we roused the coolies from their five-hour rest, and prepared for the fifteen-mile journey over O Tomi Toge pass. The little midshipmen slid the screens and beckoned us up to the liliputian balcony again. “It is the night Fuji" said one of them, softly, pointing to the dark violet cone, striped with its ghostly snow, and illuminated by a shrunken ​yellow moon that hung fantastic above O Tomi Toge’s wall.
With our commander-in-chief perched high on a pack-horse, whose chair-like saddle left his rider’s heels resting on the neck of the animal, and the kago coolies slipping and floundering through the bottomless mud of the roads, we once more started on our way. The whole country was dark, silent, and deserted, and the only audible sound was the chatter of our army of coolies, who chirped and frolicked like boys out of school. The night air over the rice-fields was warm and heavy, and seemed to suffocate us, and fire-flies drifted in and out among the rushes and bamboos. Deep, roaring streams filled the channels that had been mere silver threads of water a few days before. The coolies could barely keep their footing as they waded waist-deep in the rushing water, and at every ford we half expected to be drowned.
At the summit of the pass we dismounted, and the coolies scattered for a long rest. The sacred mountain was clear and exquisite in the pale gray of dawn; and while we watied to see the sun rise on Fuji, a dirty-brown fog scudded in from the sea, crossed the high moon, and instantly the plain faded from view and we were left, isolated Brocken figures, to eat our four-o’clock breakfast of dry bread and chocolate, and return to the kagos. Everywhere we encountered traces of a heayy storm, the path being gullied and washed into a deep ditch with high banks, whose heavy-topped, white lilies brushed into the kagos as we passed. Half asleep, we watched the green panorama unfolding as we descended, and at eight o’clock we were set down in Miyanoshita. Nesans ran hither and thither excitedly, to bring coffee and toast, to prepare baths, produce the luggage we had left behind, and mildly rehearse to the other domestics the astonishing story of our adventures. By noon, when ​we came forth arrayed in the garb of civilization, we were heroes.
For weeks after we returned to the plain, the treacherous Fujiyama stood unusually clear and near at hand. “The summer Fuji,” its dark-brown slopes only touched with a fine line or two of snow, is less beautiful than “the winter Fuji,” with its glistening crown; and our Mount Rainier, whose snows are eternal, whose wooded slopes shadow the dark-green waters of Puget Sound, is lovelier still. But though we have the more glorious mountain, the snow, the rocks, the forest, we have not the people instinct with love of poetry and nature; we have not the race-refinement, and the race-traditions, that would make of it another Fuji, invested with the light of dream and legend, dear and near to every heart.