The Legend of Nikko Ford and the Story of the Avoidance of Misfortune

A rose-red city, half as old as Time.

FIVE hours in the train took us to the beginning of a ’rickshaw journey of twenty-five miles. The guide unearthed an aged cart on Japanese lines, and seduced us into it by promises of speed and comfort beyond anything that a ’rickshaw could offer. Never go to Nikko in a cart. The town of departure is full of pack-ponies who are not used to it, and every third animal tries to get a kick at his friends in the shafts. This renders progress sufficiently exciting till the bumpsomeness of the road quenches all emotions save one. Nikko is reached through one avenue of cryptomerias — cypress-like trees eighty feet high, with red or dull silver trunks and hearse-plume foliage of darkest green. When I say one avenue, I mean one continuous avenue twenty-five miles long, the trees so close to each other throughout that their roots interlace and form a wall of wood on either side of the sunken road. Where it was necessary to make a village along the line of march,— that is to say once every two or three miles,— a few of the giants had been wrenched out — as teeth are wrenched from a full-planted jawto make room for the houses. Then the trees closed up as before to mount guard over the road. The banks between which we drove were alight with azaleas, camellias, and violets. ‘Glorious! Stupendous! Magnificent!’ sang the Professor and I in chorus for the first five miles, in the intervals of the bumps. The avenue took not the least notice of our praise except by growing the trees even more closely together. ‘Vistas of pillared shade’ are very pleasant to read about, but on a cold day the ungrateful heart of man could cheerfully dispense with a mile or two of it if that would shorten the journey. We were blind to the beauty around; to the files of pack-ponies, with manes like hearth-brooms and the tempers of Eblis, kicking about the path; to the pilgrims with blue and white handkerchiefs on their heads, enviable silver-grey leggings on their feet, and Buddha-like babies on their backs; to the trim country drays pulled by miniature cart-horses bringing down copper from the mines and saki from the hills; to the colour and movement in the villages where all the little children shouted ‘Ohio’s!’ and all the old people laughed. The grey tree-trunks marched us solemnly along over that horrid bad road which had been mended with brushwood, and after five hours we got Nikko in the shape of along village at the foot of a hill, and capricious Nature, to reward us for our sore bones, laughed on the instant in floods of sunshine. And upon what a mad scene did the light fall! The cryptomerias rose in front of us a wall of green darkness, a tearing torrent ran deep-green over blue boulders, and between stream and trees was thrown a blood-red bridge — the sacred bridge of red lacquer that no foot save the Mikado’s may press.

Very cunning artists are the Japanese. Long ago a great-hearted king came to Nikko River and looked across at the trees, up-stream at the torrent and the hills whence it came, and downstream at the softer outlines of the crops and spurs of wooded mountains. ‘It needs only a dash of colour in the foreground to bring this all together,’ said he, and he put a little child in a blue and white dressing-gown under the awful trees to judge the effect. Emboldened by his tenderness, an aged beggar ventured to ask for alms. Now it was the ancient privilege of the great to try the temper of their blades upon beggars and such cattle. Mechanically the king swept off the old man’s head, for he did not wish to be disturbed. The blood spurted across the granite slabs of the river-ford in a sheet of purest vermilion. The king smiled. Chance had solved the problem for him. ‘Build a bridge here,’ he said to the court carpenter, ‘of just such a colour as that stuff on the stones. Build also a bridge of grey stone close by, for I would not forget the wants of my people.’ So he gave the little child across the stream a thousand pieces of gold and went his way. He had composed a landscape. As for the blood, they wiped it up and said no more about it; and that is the story of Nikko Bridge. You will not find it in the guide-books.

I followed the voice of the river through a rickety toy-village, across some rough bottomland, till, crossing a bridge, I found myself among lichened stones, scrub, and the blossoms of spring. A hillside, steep and. wooded as the flanks of the red Aravallis, rose on my left; on my right, the eye travelled from village to crop-land, crop to towering cypress, and rested at last on the cold blue of an austere hill-top encircled by streaks of yet unmelted snow. The Nikko hotel stood at the foot of this hill; and the time of the year was May. Then a sparrow came by with a piece of grass in her beak, for she was building her nest; and I knew that the spring was come to Nikko. One is so apt to forget the changes of the year over there with you in India.

Sitting in a solemn line on the banks of the river were fifty or sixty cross-legged images which the untrained eye put down immediately as so many small Buddhas. They had all, even when the lichen had cloaked them with leprosy, the calm port and unwinking regard of the Lord of the World. They are not Buddhas really, but other things — presents from forgotten great men to dead-and-gone institutions, or else memorials of ancestors. The guide-book will tell you. They were a ghostly crew. As I examined them more closely I saw that each differed from the other. Many of them held in their joined arms a little store of river pebbles, evidently put there by the pious. When I inquired the meaning of the gift from a stranger who passed, he said: ‘Those so distinguished are images of the God who Plays with Little Children up in the Sky. He tells them stories and builds them houses of pebbles. The stones are put in his arms either that he may not forget to amuse the babies or to prevent his stock running low.’

I have no means of telling whether the stranger spoke the truth, but I prefer to believe that tale as gospel truth. Only the Japanese could invent the God who Plays with Little Children. Thereafter the images took a new aspect in my eyes and were no longer ‘Graeco-Buddhist sculptures,’ but personal friends. I added a great heap of pebbles to the stock of the cheeriest among them. His bosom was ornamented with small printed slips of prayers which gave him the appearance of a disreputable old parson with his bands in disorder. A little further up the bank of the river was a rough, solitary rock hewn into what men called a Shinto shrine. I knew better: the thing was Hindu, and I looked at the smooth stones on every side for the familiar dab of red paint. On a flat rock overhanging the water were carved certain characters in Sanskrit, remotely resembling those on a Thibetan prayer-wheel. Not comprehending these matters, and grateful that I had brought no guide-book with me, I clambered down to the lip of the river — now compressed into a raging torrent. Do you know the Strid near Bolton — that spot where the full force of the river is pent up in two yards’ breadth? The Nikko Strid is an improvement upon the Yorkshire one. The blue rocks are hollowed like soapstone by the rush of the water. They rise above head-level and in spring are tufted with azalea blossom. The stranger of the godlings came up behind me as I basked on a boulder. He pointed up the little gorge of rocks, ‘Now if I painted that as it stands, every critic in the papers would say I was a liar.’

The mad stream came down directly from a blue hill blotched with pink, through a sky-blue gorge also pink-blotched. An obviously impossible pine mounted guard over the water. I would give much to see an accurate re............