The third lake was black, ink-black, black as strong-cast shadows in the moonlight. Tarnished and still it lay, without a glitter or a gleam; yet the washing wavelets, as they poured over the stone at our feet, were pure and clear, and the high steep hills that half encircled it were dense with the greenest trees. The ghostly wood was ended, the petrified river gone; on the banks of this sombre lake living trees were growing. Tangled and thick and high, they walled in three sides of the lake, and, sweeping round in a long thin promontory, divided the ink-black waters with a sword of green. Along the hill there ran no pathway, the trees stood too thick, the hill too steep. There was no boat upon the lake nor any road around it. The black waters washed to the foot of the trees, the trees stretched green to the top of the hills, and lake and wood were still as undiscovered country. And behind us lay all the long silence of the ghostly wood. On the very edge of the promontory a white house rested, poised like a gull on the water, but the dead-black lake gave back no reflection, and the dark-green hills caught no colour from the sun, nor stirred a leaf. Silent as the waters the house poised white beneath the evening sky. On three sides the high hills shut in the lake, but on the fourth the lava-stones met the marsh, the marsh the common, and wide and flat the common stretched away to the beyond. A little while and the setting sun was down behind the hills, and all the sky was darkening into night. Far over the common, and purple as a king’s raiment, rose Fuji San. Grand and lonely he stood between dark earth and darkening sky; far off on the edge of the world, and all the solemn stillness of the evening wrapt him round. Gently fell the twilight on lake and hill. The grey spaces of the common stretched more vast and wide. The night was coming fast. Beneath my feet the blackness of the waters opened as the deep abyss. Behind, the horror of the spell-bound wood waited wide-eyed. Sweeping onwards in the twilight the indistinctness of the common passed out of sight, the pathless hills closed round me. Then the spell of the ghostly wood reached out to clutch. I looked towards the light.... Dim as Life’s hope it lay, far off beyond the horizon, while all the blackness of the lake and hill surrounded me. I strained my eyes across the indistinctness, and from that far-off heaven a lofty Presence leaned. It was the Great God Fuji. III EPILOGUE The blue sea lies sleeping warm and still; the sky, another sea, sleeps too; only the green headlands standing between blue and blue watch, their feet in the water. And the heat is the heat of a summer’s noon. So still the sea, so quiet the sky, so calm the earth that the soft breath of the sleeping ocean comes as a rippling sigh towards the land, while the blue sea above floats lazy.