From time to time the boy would sway his lantern to one side or the other, and stunted shrubs like London laurel trees would start into being, and disappear. With each swing of the lantern the stunted shrubs grew scarcer and more stunted, till they dwindled to bushes, to mere green weeds like dandelions, to nothingness. Then the light fell on cinder, piled up, half-burnt cinder with ends of broken brickbats, and all the rubbish of a dust-heap. And at each step the wind came up and up; colder, stronger, wetter it tore down the bare steep slopes driving us backwards. Then we would sit down upon the cinders, our backs to the mountain, our feet on the brickbats, and pant. It was distinctly exhausting. Each footstep was a launch into the unknown, and a searching for a foothold, each pause an adding to the weight of cinders that drifted down boots and clothing. And it rained with fierce splashes when the wind blew, with dull persistency when it died away, but still unceasingly. And that sense of an unseen, unknown force, paralysing all things, grew with each footstep. The chill of a dumb terror lay upon the world, and the utter desolation struck colder than the wind. We rested again while the icy wind rushed screeching through the cinders; and, as it died away, the chirp of a Japanese grasshopper came into the stillness. We were far above the weeds now, in the region of perpetual cinder, and still that grasshopper chirped weakly. But the spell was too real, the terror too deathly; the unseen, unknown force took a step nearer in the darkness, and the weak wee chirp seemed only the voice of the horror, the breath of the dumbness giving it life. The cinders grew looser and looser as we climbed, more difficult to tread, and the stagnant silence was filled and filled with sulphur. It did not come in breaths or gusts, or driving before the wind, it was there in the silence, part of it, and it wrapped us round. If dead silence can grow more deathly, then did that stillness die again. The dumb terror tightened on the world, and the unknown force came nearer. From far below the sound of pouring heavy stones drove up and up. The mountain rumbled in its depths, rumbled and was still. The presence of that unseen force was manifest. Before it terror crouched still as a bird beneath the swooping shadow of the hawk. We climbed up heavily, up through the thick sulphur and the loose steep cinders, up till we turned, and the full force of the wind came sweeping round the side of the mountain. We were walking on the edge, the real edge over which you could fall, and it was all of lava, sticky as clay and crossed with deep black cracks that had no bottom. The wind swept down here undisturbed, the gusts of rain broke sharply on the paper lantern as it swayed from side to side to peer out a way. The sticky lava softened rapidly until it sucked around our feet, drawing them down. Then a long fierce gust blew out the lantern and we stood still.