When we awoke it was already five o’clock and the _amado_ were open. The boy, careering over the matting, was detailing how the _Ijin San_ slept. We shook ourselves out of our _futon_ and went outside to wash--not in the waterbutt. Already, when we stepped upon the cinder-path, the unseen sun had touched the white clouds lying like islands in the blue beneath. And as we watched they coloured blushing, till in blood-red pools they studded thick the air below. They lay away out over the land, moving slowly through the vapoury mist. It was as if the air was half precipitated, the atmosphere made visible. We looked down on to the world below and saw it as one sees white stones at the bottom of deep water. The hidden sun was rising swiftly, and as he rose the blood-red pools faded out; the vapoury white air grew thinner, seemed slowly drying, until clear and invisible, we looked through it and saw the green earth stretching away and away to the level line of the horizon; while midway the little lakes lay sepia-black upon the green, curving so comfortably into the tiny crescent of the hills all dark with purple shadows. A fresh-washed world lying green and flat at the bottom of 7,000 feet of atmosphere. * * * * * It was cold, the water in the brass pan colder, and tingling with sudden chill we ran rapidly up the path past the scooped-out hollow where the rest-house hid--and stood transfixed. Above us, touching us, and black against a sky all blue and liquid as the living sea, was Fuji San. His clear-cut lines rose up quickly, and the mountain, whose slope our hands were holding, seemed to draw back its summit that our eyes might see it, so close it lay, so steep above. Round as a tower it rose in curves of grace, a black lighthouse springing towards the sky, delicate as Giotto’s lily tower: slender in its grace and fragile. This was no rude Colossus, mighty with brute strength, but a god, great in grace, and strong, because divine. Upwards the soaring lines rose up, coal-black, and the growing light caught faintly at a wine-red patch where the sullen fires were sleeping, caught and turned it redder; redly it glowed, smouldering into life, the living life of Fujiyama. Beneath the rounded dip of the summit were two tiny cracks, and the sky which lay so blue within the crescent curve seemed straining through. Here was neither tree nor rock, neither snow nor glacier, nothing to hide the form and substance of the mountain. Quite smoothly it rose, deep black, one great dead cinder. * * * * * It was perfectly fine when at last towards six o’clock we started to climb; and the pale blue sky lay flat behind Fuji, as the background in a picture. Our path was narrow, just a foot-wide track beaten firm in the steep cinder-slope. And we climbed, till at No. 4 we stopped to rest.