CHAPTER XII
O Curse of Asia!
Do you know Hong Kong? If not, you are poor with
poverty indeed. Except in China earth has no
lovelier spot, and heaven itself needs none. The interior
of the island is almost bleak, not beautiful, but its edge
is paradise.
Other unknown wonder-places you may a little learn from books, from travelers and from pictures, but not Hong Kong. No words can in the least describe it. The attempt is an impertinence. Canvas and camera are useless too. "Hong Kong," the gazetteers say, means "Fragrant Streams" or "Place of Sweet Lagoons." But they are absurd. "Hong Kong" means "superbly beautiful." If you know it, your eyes have been enriched forever. Climb the Peak, feathered with fern and bamboos, you are enwalled in beauty. Go far along the island by-ways, beauty leans toward you from every side, and beckons you on and still on. Pause on the bamboo-outlined path that bisects the great amphitheater of Happy Valley, and you may bathe your spirit and your sight in beauty, whether you look to the right, where the graves of European dead in China rest beneath their sumptuous coverlets of flowers, or to the left, where the Chinese jockeys, with their blue petticoats tucked up above their brown hips, and their bright satin jackets showing up their dancing cues, and English boys in regimental colors—gentlemen riders—canter neck to
