white. But all this flies by swiftly as a dream. Once more we cross a
canal; we rush up a narrow street rising to meet a hill; and Cha,
halting suddenly before an immense flight of broad stone steps, sets the
shafts of his vehicle on the ground that I may dismount, and, pointing
to the steps, exclaims: 'Tera!'

I dismount, and ascend them, and, reaching a broad terrace, find myself
face to face with a wonderful gate, topped by a tilted, peaked, many-
cornered Chinese roof. It is all strangely carven, this gate. Dragons
are inter-twined in a frieze above its open doors; and the panels of the
doors themselves are similarly sculptured; and there are gargoyles--
grotesque lion heads--protruding from the eaves. And the whole is grey,
stone-coloured; to me, nevertheless, the carvings do not seem to have
the fixity of sculpture; all the snakeries and dragonries appear to
undulate with a swarming motion, elusively, in eddyings as of water.

I turn a moment to look back through the glorious light. Sea and sky
mingle in the same beautiful pale clear blue. Below me the billowing of
bluish roofs reaches to the verge of the unruffled bay on the right, and
to the feet of the green wooded hills flanking the city on two sides.
Beyond that semicircle of green hills rises a lofty range of serrated
mountains, indigo silhouettes. And enormously high above the line of
them towers an apparition indescribably lovely--one solitary snowy
cone, so filmily exquisite, so spiritually white, that but for its
immemorially familiar outline, one would surely deem it a shape of
cloud. Invisible its base remains, being the same delicious tint as the
sky: only above the eternal snow-line its dreamy cone appears, seeming
to hang, the ghost of a peak, between the luminous land and the luminous
heaven--the sacred and matchless mountain, Fujiyama.