As we went toiling painfully along, feeling very like ants crawling up a tree-trunk, the clash of tiny cymbals, the faint echoes of talk and laughter came floating up. It was a whole party of pilgrims who came swinging up hand over hand, as it were, and as easily as if they were skating on good ice. We first saw them as we stood propped against the lava-blocks, panting, and they were far below us, tiny as dwarfs, little spots of white on the dead-black slope, away down in the second storey as we were in the sixth. But as we laboriously climbed our inches they came on swiftly--on, up, on, past us; the little bells clashing and chiming gaily to the talk and laughter. Our guide told us they were _kurumaya_ who had started from Gotemba that morning at two, and who would get back there again before dark, to work the next day as usual. Anything like the pace at which those men came up the steep slope of Fuji--for the most part straight over the long beds of loose cinders--I have never seen. It was like sailors running up a rope. They came up more swiftly than most people would care to go down, without an effort, with plenty of breath left to talk and laugh, and with that supreme ease which only comes when doing something well within the margin of one’s power. We were very glad to rest at No. 8, though our friends the _kurumaya_ had gone on cheerfully. It was such a nice large tea-house, beautifully clean, and the hot egg-bowls full of tea were peculiarly refreshing. Without the continuous tea I do not know how one would climb Fuji at all. The air at 13,000 feet freezes, but the sun of Japan pours down relentlessly, fierce as the tropics, while the hot dust drifts down one’s throat, into one’s very skin; and when the wind blows you need to cling to the shifting cinders with the very soles of your feet. Shelter on the bare slopes of Fuji there is none. Frequently the wind is so fierce even in the six brief weeks of summer that to stand upright is impossible, for Fuji’s summit is in the heart of the storm. Between the eighth and the ninth station the path was easy, but we climbed it wrapped in a sudden cloud. All the long sweep of earth below was gone. The green Tokyo plain, where the dark thunder-clouds lay brooding in the still blue air, and the great fingers of light which struck so fiercely on the little lakes beneath the mud bank of the hills, the dark cone, so near above us, all were gone, sponged out by a big cloud. And we were only climbing up a steep black rope that hung between two infinities, climbing out of space, into space. From the ninth and last station you climb into Fuji’s stronghold by a giant staircase of rough lava. It is necessary here to hoist yourself painfully up by the aid of guides or your own two hands. We climbed on slowly. The lava was quite hot, for the staircase lies cut within the slope, and gets and keeps the heat.