I should have said our horses stepped, for the first stage of Fuji San is climbable on horses, pack-horses of a unique Japanese breed, which bite. They are harnessed with elaborate trappings in scarlet and gold, saddled with huge wooden saddles, rising like the prow of a ship behind, and sloping so steeply that the middle is one long knife-blade ridge, and only a tight hold of the stirrups prevents the rider from falling. All ride straddle-legged. I do not recommend Japanese pack-horses for pleasure, comfort, or security. We plodded along over the bare common with its eternal long sweep upwards, like the swell of a great Atlantic roller, and the freshness and the coldness seemed to lift us out of Japan and carry us miles and miles north, to the chill summer of a northern land. The path which cut winding across the long up-sweep of the green common was black as ink, and shining with the wet of mountain clouds. Fuji was invisible, but as the deep rumble of the thunder, deadened behind the thick white clouds which bounded path and common, rolled slowly out of hearing it was as if Great Fuji spoke. Behind the mist the presence of the “honourable mountain” could be surely felt. Already the world seemed sunk away and the pilgrimage begun. Over the green common the pack-horses plodded. Our guide and the little girl groom, in her thick blue hose and dark blue tunic, were far behind talking in peace. The big drops of rain which the thunder brought had ceased to fall, and the freshness and the chill coming after the tropical heat of the plain stung strength to life again. Even the pack-horses grew less sulky, and urging made them shuffle into something near a trot. But this outbreak of energy, which lasted perhaps eighty yards, was more than enough for comfort, though it added to experience, for like the knights of old who “clove” their enemies in two, we too “clove,” but in another direction. It was painful. So the horses sank back into their bad-tempered pace, and the wide common swept onwards and upwards. After awhile the monotony of the black path crossing the green common was varied by stunted bushes which, gradually growing bigger and bigger, actually enclosed the cinder-track as English hedges an English lane. But the change was brief and the sloping green world with the long black line of path winding across it came back again.