The second lake was set deep within the circle of the hills, and we crossed it in company with three men who had drunk much _saké_, and another who stuck fuses into a row of dynamite cartridges and then, leaving them under a corner of the matting in the bottom of the boat, apparently forgot their existence. These four passengers and the two boatmen were continually stumbling up and down the boat to row in turns, and always within a few inches of the dynamite. It was a somewhat agitating row, although we were assured the cartridges were “only for fishing.” It ended at last, after a long two hours of suspense, among the quiet grey boulders which stretched for a hundred yards between the water and the wood. Down the little valley beyond the stones, a winding river of rice-fields ran like a grass-green stream, and we followed it, as one follows up a mountain brook, till it dwindled and disappeared. Then the wood closed in above it, and we were in the middle of a weird uncanny forest, all grey and wrinkled, where multitudes of thick-set pole-like trees, covered with a powdery dust, ranged ghost-like out of sight. And here we walked, the only living things in a spell-bound world, walked until the earth grew thin beneath our feet and the rough grey boulders came up through the soil. Then for a long, long while we went beside a grey lava-river flowing between the grey tree-stems, a wide and furious river arrested as it swept in angry tumult through the wood, stopped dead, and each breaking wave turned into stone. We looked at this still, dead river and saw how the years had covered the waves with a thick white crust of dust. Buried deep lay that tempest of passion which once had swept burning from Fuji’s sides, buried deep beneath blocks of grey lava and the drifting ash-grey dust. Yet the very stones that buried it were carved in its image. And the face of that passion, petrified and deadly, looked up from the river. And all around the grey wood stood dead too, and very still, coated deep with a powdery dust, ash-grey. For the spell of the river was over the wood, and it was the death of Destruction. For miles we walked beside that Medusa river, sometimes we left it, sometimes we crossed it, then losing it between the trees we wandered where the ghostly pole-like trunks grew thickest. But always the river came back with the dead passion that made it staring rigid beneath the stones. Miles and miles of lava, wide, and long, and deep. The ghostly trees were rooted in it, the very lakes lay cradled in it, the world for far around was made of it. Verily the fires of Fuji San were mighty in those days. * * * * *