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The Peerless Mountain is twelve miles away as you stand here on the high bank above the lake. You are looking nearly southeast; Tokyo is some seventy miles away at the ease, i. e. a little farther toward the left. This lake is one of a chain of beautiful little sheets of water laying around Fuji's northerN base -- there are beautiful views of Fuji or Fujiyama (yama means "Mountain") from every side. Notice how the clouds lie just now about its base like fallen draperies, and see what a magnificent crown of glistening white has been given it by an early autumn snowfall. No wonder that Japanese poets have sung of this mountain, that artists have drawn it and painted it, at all times of the day and all seasons of the year, till people all around the world recognize that stately cone when they see it pictured on a Japanese fan or screen. To the common people it is even more than a marvellously beautiful volcanic peak - it is a supernatural, sacred thing to be regarded with awe as well as delight, and to be approached on in the reverent spirit of a pilgrim bent on worship. It is said that fully thirty thousand pilgrims do club to the top every summer, walk around the huge, open crater at the top, worship at a shrine on the summit and stay over night to pray to the rising sun, from that faraway height more than two miles aloft in air above the quiet level of this little blue lake.
There has been no eruption from Fuji's crater since 1708, but the volcano cannot be counted as extinct, for there are places away up there near the crater where the lava rocks are always hot and steam comes up in rifts here and there among the ledges. Practically all those long, dark, symmetrical slopes are masses of volcanic cinders - bits of the rock interior of the earth blown into fragments by the force of fearful explosions.
(See Scidmore's "Jinrikisha Days in Japan," etc.)
From Notes of Travel, No. 8, copyright, 1904, by Underwood & Underwood.
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Glorious Fuji Seen through the Pines at Lake Motosu; Japan.
Fuji Glorieux Vu à travers les Pins au Lac Motosu; Japon.
Der herrliche Fuji durch einen Binienwald beim Motosu-See gefehen; Japan.
Fuji Glorioso Visto á través de los Pinos en el Lago Motosul Japón.
Det härliga Fuji sedt genom granarne vid Motosu-insjön; Japan.
Видъ фyжи чepeэъ cocнoвый лвcъ cъ oэepa Мoтocy; Япoнiя.