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Fuji had arranged a series of scuppers, made of oilcloth, underneath the chairs; but in spite of this the dining-room rug, after a meal, looked much as the desert place must have after the feeding of the multitude. Fuji, who was pensive, recalled the five loaves and two fishes that produced twelve baskets of fragments. The vacuum cleaner got clogged by a surfeit of crumbs.
Gissing sat by the spare-room bed until he was sure the puppies were sleeping correctly. He closed the door so that Fuji would not hear him humming a lullaby. Three Blind Mice was the only nursery song he could remember, and he sang it over and over again. When he tiptoed downstairs, Fuji had gone to bed. Gissing went into his study, lit a pipe, and walked up and down, thinking.
The Naniwa and the Shikishima saw the Chih' Yuen approaching, like the messenger of death she was, and backed away from their opponents; the Fuji turned her guns on the approaching vessel; but the Yoshino's captain, blinded by smoke from the wrecked funnel, did not see what was coming until it was too late, and a moment later the Chinese ship crashed into his stern, unfortunately striking a glancing blow instead of a direct one, as Frobisher had intended.
The same thing is true of their great hospital and boarding-house, and the dining-room is also surprisingly clean and well kept. Of the welfare work proper a whole article could be written. From this a pension is given the family of any employee who dies, while if an operative gets sick or is injured, a committee, assisted by Director Fuji, allows a suitable pension until recovery.
Then suddenly a flare of fire shot up directly behind the cone of Fuji, flaming into the coal-bank of clouds above the mountain, as if the old shaggy seer had forgotten his age and was dreaming of youth again when the earth was young and he was a volcano.
True, the Yoshino and the Fuji were little better than wrecks, and the other ships had one and all received a very severe drubbing; but they were still afloat and more or less under control, while their undamaged guns now outnumbered those of the Chinese by about six to one. The odds were too heavy.
Often the passengers can see from the ships at night a strange red glow over the sky, and know that the fire mountains are burning. The most beautiful of these volcanoes is Mt. Shishaldin, nearly nine thousand feet high, and almost as perfect a cone in shape as Fuji Yama, which the Japanese love so much and call 'the Honourable Mountain. At Unalaska or Ilinlink, the 'curving beach, we stop.
There is some charm unutterable in the morning air, cool with the coolness of Japanese spring and wind-waves from the snowy cone of Fuji; a charm perhaps due rather to softest lucidity than to any positive tone an atmospheric limpidity extraordinary, with only a suggestion of blue in it, through which the most distant objects appear focused with amazing sharpness.
His Majesty was afraid to touch the Elixir of Life, so he sent it with the letter to the top of the most sacred mountain in the land. Mount Fuji, and there the Royal emissaries burnt it on the summit at sunrise. So to this day people say there is smoke to be seen rising from the top of Mount Fuji to the clouds.
Also I retain a vivid memory of pilgrim-figures poised upon the topmost crags of the summit of Fuji, clapping their hands in prayer, with faces to the East .... Perhaps ten thousand twenty thousand-years ago all humanity so worshipped the Lord of Day .... After having saluted the sun, the worshipper returns to his house, to pray before the Kamidana and before the tablets of the ancestors.
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