Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/163

 made the Tokaido a straight and pleasant way; and Moto’s judicial countenance caused Nikko, Chiuzenji, and Yumoto to disclose unimagined beauties and luxuries.

all Japan’s sacred places, Nikko, or Sun’s Brightness, is dearest to the Japanese heart. Art, architecture, and landscape gardening add to Nature's opulence, history and legend people it with ancient splendors, and all the land is full of memories. “He who has not seen Nikko cannot say Kekko!" (beautiful, splendid, superb), runs the Japanese saying. With its forest shades, its vast groves, and lofty avenues, its hush, its calm religious air, Nikko is an ideal and dream-like place, where rulers and prelates may well long to be buried, and where priests, poets, scholars, artists, and pilgrims love to abide. Each day of a whole summer has new charms, and Nikko’s strange fascination but deepens with acquaintance.

The one long street of Hachi-ishi, or lower Nikko village, ends at the banks of the Dayagawa, a roaring stream that courses down a narrow valley, walled at its upper end by the bold, blue bar of Nantaisan, the sacred mountain. Legend has peopled this valley of the Dayagawa with impossible beings—giants, fairies, demons, and monsters. Most of the national fairy stories begin with, “Once upon a time in the Nikko mountains,” and one half expects to meet imp or fay in the green shadows. Mound builder and prehistoric man had lived their squalid lives here; the crudest and earliest forms of religion had been observed in these forest sanctuaries long 147