d spun-gold glory. There it stood.

"There it is! There it is! Look!" a fellow traveler cried.

"There is what?" I called. We were on top of a great American College
building in Tokyo.

"It's Fuji!"

I had given up hope. We had been there two weeks and Fujiyama was not to
be seen. The mists, fogs, and clouds of winter had kept it hidden from
our wistful, wondering, waiting eyes.

But there it stood, like a naked man, unashamed; proud of its white
form; without a single cloud; burning in the white sunlight. Its huge
shoulders were thrown back as with suppressed strength. Its white chest,
a Walt Whitman hairy with age; gray-breasted with snow; bulged out like
some mighty wrestler, challenging the world. No wonder they worship it!

I had gloried in Fujiyama from many a varied viewpoint. I had caught
this great shrine of Japanese devotion in many of its numberless moods.
I had seen it outlined against a clear-cut morning sunlight, bathed in
the glory of a broadside of light fired from the open muzzle of the sun.
I had seen it shrouded in white clouds; and also with black clouds
breeding a storm, at even-time. I had seen it with a crown of white upon
its brow, and I had seen it with a necklace of white cloud pearls about
its neck.

Once I saw this great mountain looking like some ominous volcano through
a misty gray winter evening. And one mid-afternoon I saw it almost
circled by a misty rainbow, a sight never to be forgotten on earth or in
heaven by one whose soul considers a banquet of beauty more worth
shouting over than an invitation to feast with a King.

But the last sight I caught of Fuji was the last night that I was in
Tokyo, as I rode up from the Ginza on New Year's eve out toward Aoyama
Gakuin, straight into a sunset, unsung, unseen by mortal eye.

Before me loomed the great mountain like a monstrous mass of mighty
ebony carved by some delicate and yet gigantic artist's hand.

I soon discovered where the artist got the ebony from which to carve
this pointed mountain of ebony with its flat top; for far above this
black silhouetted mountain was a mass of ebony clouds that seemed to
spread from the western horizon clear to the rim of the eastern horizon
and beyond into the unseen Sea of Japan in the back yard of the island.
It was from this mass of coal-black midnight-black clouds that the giant
artist carved his ebony Fuji that night.

But not all was black. Perhaps the giant forged that mountain rather