Ray thought of Helen. He would have liked to tell her about this mountain, this mountain that had apparently reminded his father of another mountain, a Japanese mountain, and wondered if he could write her in such a way that she would understand that what he really wanted to tell her could never be written down. What he wanted—what he must have wanted—was a simple return to the way things had been before, and to that end he would have rolled the whole clock all the way back to his own childhood, before his heart had gone crazy, before his family had been sent off the only land he had ever known.

He sometimes thought of that great white peak in the long days after they arrived at Tule Lake: the barracks arranged in orderly rows, the fencing that enclosed them straight and clean, sagebrush rolling off in all directions, and the jagged line of Castle Rock rising against the southern sky. Beyond it, somewhere, was the white tower of Mount Shasta which he had come to think of as the ghost of his father’s memory of Fujisan but which held no meaning to the son except that it lay in the general direction of home, a beacon he could not see for the desolate outcropping that stood in its path. He told himself that he would scale that desolation one day, perhaps soon, simply so that he could once more see what lay beyond it in the long stretch of the country to the southwest, the sugar pine and foxtail, cedars and firs and, once or twice along the road, oak trees like those that dotted the hills behind them. Here in the camp there were no trees at all.