As we went on, the faintly curving common, which always sloped round and up, grew wilder and wilder. There were fewer flowers on the black soil. Sometimes the cinders lay all bare in large dull patches against the coarse grass. We were on the broad swelling slope of Fuji, on the edge of the first ripple before it dies away into the smooth water of the plain below. And we were crawling slowly from the first to the second ripple as a fly crawls round the curve of an orange. Fuji himself was invisible. For all we could see he did not exist. Spread out before our eyes was only the endless swelling line of the green common, always curving round and up. From time to time our driver blew a melancholy thin note from a tiny copper horn shaped like a thickened comma and ornamented with a worked band of brass, a pathetic far-off note unknown to western scales. Our tram-line was laid among the ample cinders of Fuji’s burnt-out fires, and sometimes the curves were very sharp. Then the conductor, balanced on the step and grasping the window-frame with both hands, jerked the tram towards him to keep it on the lines; and we rounded the curves in triumph. The compact mass of passenger which filled the tram interior looked on unperturbed, while those in the window-frames kindly adjusted their weight to assist the conductor. And the melancholy thin note of the copper horn travelled over the long slope of the upward-tending common as we crawled slowly on. In the midst of a perfect stocking-heel of knitting-needles, which all looked as though they were about to begin violently knitting at once, the tram stopped, and the compact mass of passenger disintegrated itself slowly. Having been the first to enter we were the last to detach ourselves from the general lump, and when we did recover a separate entity the knitting-needles lay gleaming in the cindery mud--and there was nothing else. We stumbled on over them for some time, until a ticket-hole in a sentry-box restored our belief that it was a stopping-place and not an accident. So we stood still and shouted for our tea-house boy by name. He came running, in long, tight-fitting, blue trousers like thick cotton hose and a blue tunic; and he was a girl, a pretty bright-coloured girl with daintily coiffured hair; and we all set off for the tea-house. Subashiri is another straggling ill-kept street, all tea-houses and long cotton banners tied to bamboo poles, and our tea-house was the last of them all. It lay on the very edge of Fuji, and when we left it, after all our preparations had been completed, our lunch eaten, our guide engaged, we stepped straight on to the endless curve of upward-tending common.