In western lands the Roman Catholic peasant prays before his altar, but the symbol of his Godhead is often reduced to a composite Christ in pink and white plaster. If Truth must have a form--and mankind believes with difficulty in abstract nouns--it surely is a purer, grander faith to feel God visible in Fuji’s curves, dwelling in his sleeping fires, than to hem Him in a building made by man and seat Him on an ugly altar between groups of tawdry flowers. * * * * * The little narrow path which led down into the crack led also round the summit below the jagged edges of the crater’s rim, and we followed it. Outside the crack it went steeply downwards before it turned, for above, the cindery slopes of Fuji were steaming white in the sunshine, and the ground was very hot. It is but a patch, still evidence that Fuji sleeps. He is not dead. Then the wandering pathway, a black thread on the loose cinder-slope, led up again, round and down into a tiny fold among the cinders, and suddenly, quickly as a camera snaps, the white clouds, loosely piled upon the mountain, were riven asunder, and the whole world shimmering in a golden haze that touched but did not hide it, lay at our feet. Straight down below, 13,000 feet away, it lay. All the long line of the river Fujikawa, gleaming blue-black as rough-cast iron, among the orange sand-flats of its mouth. And the soft curves of the Yokohama peninsula, a smaller but more graceful Italy, floating, floating, on the water, purple-blue on azure blue. And all beyond was the blue intensity of the infinite sea. So near it looked, so clear that the steely line of the Fujikawa seemed a sword-blade one could stoop and reach. And leaning we looked from Fuji’s top as from a tower; but Fuji’s self we could not see. His cinder-slopes had vanished. Straight down below there was the world, and we above it hung suspended 13,000 feet above the earth. Beyond, above, outside of it. Dear Earth, how still it lay, how beautiful! And into my mind there floated the old, old words: “And He divided the land from the waters, and the dry land He called Earth.... And God looked and saw that it was good.” Above the world, beyond it, we too could look and see, and we too “saw that it was good.” * * * * * Then the little wandering track, beaten firm by the feet of the pilgrims, led on, up and down, among the cinders of Fuji’s sides, and round to that great crack in the cup’s rim where the pathway from Gotemba reached the summit. Here were crowds of people, all the pilgrims on Fuji San, pouring through the white-wood wicket, or buying draughts of the sacred “Golden Water” which is born in the depths of the crater. As we stood drinking our little bowlful of the ice-cold water, the low boom of a Japanese temple bell came swaying through the air, and each jagged peak round the crater’s rim added its muffled echo to the bell’s deep boom.