Then first to the pilgrim’s gaze the steeps revealed their nakedness;—and a trembling seized him,—and a ghastly fear. For there was not any ground,—neither beneath him nor about him nor above him,—but a heaping only, monstrous and measureless, of skulls and fragments of skulls and dust of bone,—with a shimmer of shed teeth strown through the drift of it, like the shimmer of scrags of shell in the wrack of a tide. “Do not fear, my son!” cried the voice of the Bodhisattva;—“only the strong of heart can win to the place of the Vision!” Behind them the world had vanished. Nothing remained but the clouds beneath, and the sky above, and the heaping of skulls between,—up-slanting out of sight. Then the sun climbed with the climbers; and there was no warmth in the light of him, but coldness sharp as a sword. And the horror of stupendous height, and the nightmare of stupendous depth, and the terror of silence, ever grew and grew, and weighed upon the pilgrim, and held his feet,—so that suddenly all power departed from him, and he moaned like a sleeper in dreams. “Hasten, hasten, my son!” cried the Bodhisattva: “the day is brief, and the summit is very far away.” But the pilgrim shrieked,—“I fear! I fear unspeakably!—and the power has departed from me!” “The power will return, my son,” made answer the Bodhisattva…. “Look now below you and above you and about you, and tell me what you see.” “I cannot,” cried the pilgrim, trembling and clinging; “I dare not look beneath! Before me and about me there is nothing but skulls of men.” “And yet, my son,” said the Bodhisattva, laughing softly,—“and yet you do not know of what this mountain is made.” The other, shuddering, repeated:—“I fear!—unutterably I fear!…there is nothing but skulls of men!” “A mountain of skulls it is,” responded the Bodhisattva. “But know, my son, that all of them ARE YOUR OWN! Each has at some time been the nest of your dreams and delusions and desires. Not even one of them is the skull of any other being. All,—all without exception,—have been yours, in the billions of your former lives.” Furisodé Recently, while passing through a little street tenanted chiefly by dealers in old wares, I noticed a _furisodé_, or long-sleeved robe, of the rich purple tint called _murasaki_, hanging before one of the shops. It was a robe such as might have been worn by a lady of rank in the time of the Tokugawa. I stopped to look at the five crests upon it; and in the same moment there came to my recollection this legend of a similar robe said to have once caused the destruction of Yedo.