Mount Fuji, in its own contour lines.

What the print holds

Mount Fuji on paper

Fuji is a volcano, and a young one, so its slopes have not yet been cut into the ridges and valleys that older mountains wear. On paper that makes it almost a diagram. At the default frame, thirty-four kilometres across, the rings of the upper cone are close together and nearly round, and they open out steadily as the slope eases, until the outermost ones wander loosely across the plain at the foot of the mountain.

That plain is not empty. On the northern side the lines run out into level ground broken by blank shapes, the lakes along the mountain's northern foot, which print as flat water with no contour crossing them. In the corners of the sheet the ground rises again into older hills — to the north-west beyond the lakes, and to the south-east, where Ashitaka stands — drawn in tight, wriggling lines that make the cone beside them look smoother still.

Because the cone is so regular, the heavy lines are the easiest on any of our prints to read. The print draws a contour every hundred metres at this frame and makes every fifth one heavier, so the heavy rings are five hundred metres apart and the whole mountain is a set of them stacked from the plain to the rim. The lowest ground on the sheet is barely above sea level; the summit is over three and a half kilometres above it.

The top of the mountain is a crater. At the default width it is too small to draw as more than the innermost rings, but close the frame in and it appears as high ground around a hollow, with the summit on its rim.