Seizing the basket, the boy fled, our one and only guide. We followed him, over the cracks and the spongy soft lava, too occupied with wondering how we had ever passed over it safely the night before to be afraid now--too busy, too, watching the boy fleeing in front of us, too occupied marking his path to think even of eruptions. And somehow we got over safely, back on to the solid cinder slope of Asama again, the slope that went down straight as a shoot, and fell away as abruptly on each side as a bridge. It was ground, and after the cracks and the sucking lava, solid, though the cinders did shift beneath our feet. We had leisure to look round us, and found the mountain wrapped in a thick white mist. By this time the boy had disappeared entirely, but we did not trouble now. There seemed no choice of paths down. Our cinder bridge went on, sloping steeply downwards into the hidden world below, and we followed it. * * * * * A little way below, the mist sank suddenly beneath our feet, and we were walking in the yellow sunlight--walking down a cinder slope that shone jet-black against a pale blue sky, while all around and all beneath, and surging up against the cinder slope, floated a wild wide sea of dead white clouds--a dead, still sea, with its waves stiffened into frozen snow. Tossing, it lay beneath the clear blue sky, and the pale sun glinted on its snow-white crests, glinted on the still gigantic billows that stretched from cinder pathway to the far blue sky. It lay a silent sea of milk-white frozen waves that was such stuff as dreams are made of. * * * * * And we went on, down. As the gods of old along a sloping bridge that crossed the clouds and stretched from the blue heaven to the hidden earth beneath, like Izanagi and Izanami, as they crossed the rainbow bridge from the High Plain of Heaven and stirred the floating brine with their jewelled spear--stirred till it went “_koro, koro_”--till it went “curdle, curdle,” as the old chronicle says, and the drops that dripping fell from the celestial spear piled up into the firstborn of the islands of Japan. A sudden peal of echoing thunder shook our cinder bridge, and we turned abruptly. Somewhere on the other side of the topmost edge of cinder rose up a huge column of thick smoke. The wickedest dead-white smoke, which, slowly curling over at the tips like ostrich feathers, showed shadows of deep mauve and dull blue-purple, while from below the heavy pouring of great stones drove up and up. Asama rumbled, rumbled in her depths. Half an hour sooner we should have been up there still. Had we gone on to the crater we should have been on the very edge. The memory of the sharp-edged clattering stones, red-hot and big as fists, came back to us. We looked at one another silently, and went on, downwards.