Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/157

 Once out of the streets of this little provincial capital, the way to Nikko leads up a straight broad avenue, lined.on both sides for twenty-seven miles with tall and ancient cryptomerias, whose branches meet in a Gothic arch overhead. The blue outlines of the Nikko mountains showed in the distance as we entered the grand avenue. The road is a fine piece of engineering, with its ascent so slow and even as to seem level; but at times the highway, with its superb walls of cryptomeria, is above the level of the fields, then even with them, and then below them, as it follows its appointed lines. Before the railway reached Utsonomiya, travellers from Tokio had a boat journey, and then a jinrikisha ride of seventy miles through the shaded avenue. This road was made two centuries ago, when the Shoguns chose Nikko as their burial place, and these venerable trees have shaded the magnificent funeral trains of the old warriors, and the splendid processions of their successors, who made pilgrimages to the tombs of lyeyasu and lyemitsu. In our day, alas, instead of mighty daimios and men-at-arms in coats of mail, or brocaded grandees in gilded palanquins, telegraph-poles, slim, ugly, and utilitarian, impertinently thrust themselves forward before the grand old tree-trunks, and the jinrikisha and the rattle-trap basha take their plebeian way.

The cryptomeria has the reddish bark and long, smooth bole of the California sequoia, and through the mat of leaves and branches, high overhead, the light filters down in a soft twilight that casts a spell over the place. After sunset the silence and stillness of the shaded avenue were solemn, and its coolness and the fragrance of moist earth most grateful. Two men ran tandem with each jinrikisha, and they went racing up the avenue for ten miles, halting only once for a sip of cold water before they stopped at the hamlet of Osawa. The villages, a row of low houses on either side of the 141