And to-day the God Protector watches still, and yearly the people come, in the white garb of pilgrims, chanting to his shrine. For six short summer weeks they come. Then the winds rush down, the snow falls, the tempests rage, and Lord Fuji lives alone. No human being has yet stayed a winter on his summit, and even in the summer weeks the winds will blow the lava blocks from the walls of the rest-houses, and sometimes the pilgrim from the path. For Fuji stands alone, not one peak among a range, but utterly alone. Rising straight out of the sea on one side, and from the great Tokyo plain on the other, his twelve thousand three hundred and sixty-five feet, in two long curving lines of exquisite grace, rise up and up into the blue, and not one inch of one foot is hidden or lost; it is all there, visible as a tower built on a treeless plain. It dominates the landscape. It can be seen from thirteen provinces; and from a hundred miles at sea the pale white peak of Fuji floats above the blue. * * * * * It was a day in the beginning of August, in the very middle of those hot three weeks which are the great festival of Fuji San, in the simmering dawn of a summer’s day that we left Tokyo for Subashiri. As the train approached Gotemba the whole crowded carriageful of Japanese looked eagerly for Fuji. The train was climbing slowly by a mountain stream, and we were all looking, looking, beyond the dark green pine-trees of the river’s bank. Suddenly, for one dazzling moment, the deep blue cone of Fuji lay pillowed on a bank of clouds in the middle of the clear blue sky. Then, swiftly, the clouds rolled up and up. Fuji San was gone. The whole carriageful gave vent to those long strangled _h’s_ of admiration and delight, and with a murmured “Fuji San seeing have” sank back on their heels on the cushions. Gotemba is the nearest railway station to Fujiyama, and the highest. It lies a thousand feet up. Being the most accessible, it is the most usual starting-point for the climb, but it is not the most picturesque. A wonderful line of trams now connects Gotemba with Subashiri, and even with Yoshida, a place half round the base of the mountain. We were to start from Subashiri and come down to Yoshida, and return by the lakes. So from the station we walked up the straggling, badly kept street of Gotemba, where every house is a hotel and every hotel hangs out many advertisements in the shape of cotton streamers twelve feet long and six inches wide, which are attached by rings to bamboo poles. So through groves of white and blue and brown banners all adorned with beautiful Chinese symbols we walked to the tramway.