mountains were we, that pale Irises, quaker-robed, still lingered, and held silent meetings in damp hollows, while Azaleas, bold in their colour and rich in their perfume, ran like fire over field, beside rocks, through the underbrush, and into edges of the woods—the most heart-arresting sight I ever saw. A paraphrase of the Japanese poet might put it—
“Above Chuzenji, like a field on fire,
The wild Azalea’s scarlet paints the plains.
Or is it that the great gods fought and fell,
And blood-red flowers sprang up from the stains?”
I take the same delight that a savage does in fiery, passionate colour, and would have dismounted, and simply wallowed in Azalea blooms, if Himself, who has an occult gift for scenting the neighbourhood of snakes, had not warned me to stick to my horse. As it was, it seemed as if every turn of the rocky, uncertain path we had taken up to the hara revealed a sinuous zigzag darkly gliding into the cliff-side, or over the edge opposite, which leapt down almost sheer into the raging cataract below. I hate a height, and as my poor old doddering horse backed towards the precipice every time that he was bitten by a fly, or that I screamed at the sight of a snake, I was rather too literally between the devil—the serpent—and the deep sea—the abyss.
Another hara, or ‘upland meadow land,’ in
