Straight towards the altar led the mountain path. This was the gateway of Lord Fuji. Each path that climbs the “honourable mountain” leads through a temple to the temple on the top. At the first shrine the pilgrim buys his long white staff, stamped with the temple crest, which he carries with him upwards to the summit. We bought our staves. And the old man, thrusting a thin bar of iron like a stick of sealing-wax into the charcoal fire, burnt the crest of Subashiri’s shrine into the clean white wood, and with a courteous gesture he said the prayer which we, unknowing, had left unsaid. Lord Fuji is neither fierce nor exclusive, all the world may come as pilgrims through his gateways. From the great Sun-Goddess the Mikado sprang, and the people of Japan are all kin to the Shintō gods, but the Shintō gods themselves welcomed the Lord Buddha when he came. Side by side with the older gods Buddha’s temples stand to-day, and Lord Buddha, too, once said, “All men are one”; and again, “All living things are brothers to mankind”; for Buddha, like the modern scientists, declared the world, all worlds, and all that in them is, one, in substance one. Three steps from the temple and the trees of the wood shut over it as waters over a stone. It was lost. Lord Fuji is greater than his temples. With the help of our staves we climbed on up the steep cinder-path, till the great green trees, dripping slowly, dwindled, drew back, were ended. On the very edge of the wood was a tea-house, the _Ichi-gō_, No. 1 station, a roughly built wooden-walled tea-house, on the edge of whose matting, with our feet on the path, we sat and drank tea, innumerable egg-bowls of hot green tea. While we were sitting here a whole party of pilgrims, in their white hose trousers, their white tunics tucked into their white _obi_, and their wash-basin-big straw hats, came down the path. They turned into the tea-house, and one old man, dropping on to the matting, rolled himself into a corner and was covered with _futon_. He had caught cold on the top, and was perfectly exhausted with pain and fatigue. But as he lay in the corner, clutching the _futon_ to him as though to press a concrete warmth into his numbed bones, there was in his eyes a look of dwelling content that not all the pain nor all the fatigue could overcome. He had climbed from the threshold to the sanctuary of Fuji; had knelt by the cloud-swept altar; felt the might of the God in the winds of his summit, in the still depths of his crater; caught up with Lord Fuji on high, he had looked down upon earth. What now was pain or fatigue? * * * * *