The Crimson Azaleas: A Novel

THE ROAD TO NIKKO
“Upon the road to Nikko, Where the pilgrims pray, Along the road to Nikko Either side the way, Thundering great camellia trees Decked with blossoms gay, Adorn the road to Nikko, The mountain road to Nikko, In the month of May.”
The singer stopped singing and began to whistle. Then he broke out into prose.
“Damn boots! I’ll be lame in another mile. Why can’t we be content with sandals like our ‘brithers’ the Japs!”
“Dinna damn boots, but their makers,” replied his companion, a sandy Scot of fifty or more, dressed in broadcloth and a bowler, a figure at once a blot upon the lonely road and a blasphemy against Japan—a blot whose name was M’Gourley. “I vara well remember when I was in Gleska—”
“Oh, don’t!” said the poet of the Nikko road, Dick Leslie by name, a young man, or rather a man still young, very tall, straight, dark, and good-looking, and a gentleman from the crown of his close-clipped, curly black head to the soles of the boots that were torturing him. “Don’t haul up your factory chimneys, your smoke and whisky bottles in this place of places. I believe if a Scot ever gets into heaven he’ll start his first conversation with his first angel by making some reference to Gleska: Look there!”
“Whaur?”
“There!” cried Leslie, turning from the direction of Fubasami and the beginning of the great Nikko valley before them, and pointing backwards away towards Kureise over an expanse of distant country where the clouds were drawing soft shadows across the rice fields and the sinuous hills; over little woods of fir and cryptomeria trees, lakes where the lotus flowers spread in summer, and the king-fisher flashed like a jewel; over occasional fields of flowers, flowers that grew by the million and the million.
Many of these details were absorbed and dulled by distance, yet still lent their spirit to the scene, producing a landscape most strange and quaint.
Nearly every other country seems flung together by nature, but Japan seems to have been imagined by some great artist of the ancient days—imagined and constructed.