Up now and diagonally across China’s great mountains, the faint smudge of rust that is the extraordinary autumn bloom of the Jiuzhaigou Valley and then the Gobi Desert in seeming plainness, except in looking closer there are the fearless brushstrokes of a painter who sees in sand the movement of water and sees in brown bolts of duck-egg mauve lemon and crimson, and casts the arid in shades of oil spill, and makes of canyons nacreous shells. And on it presses, the northward orbit, into the afternoon of North Korea and up above Hokkaido. Japan is a wisp trailing into a vanishing point. It was
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