CHAPTER XIX.

_THE SACRED MOUNTAIN OF OMI._

Luncheon with a Chief Priest.--Tigers.--Mysterious Lights.--The View of a Lifetime.--Pilgrims.--Glory of Buddha.--Unburied Priests.

It was very hot in Chungking in 1892--too hot, we feared, for us to bear, worn out as we were by the emotions and excessive heat of the river journey, entered upon too late in the summer. So, while we yet could, we secured four bearer sedan-chairs, with blue cotton awnings six yards long, after the fashion of this windless province, and, with bath-towels to bind round our heads, and sun-hats, and dark glasses, and all that following necessary for a land journey of between twenty and thirty men, were carried for a fortnight through a rich agricultural district, a region of salt wells and petroleum springs, on through the white-wax country to the foot of sacred Omi. A letter written at the time to a cousin, with whom I had two years before driven through our own lovely Lake country, and who I knew shared my delight in strange surroundings and the unexpected, will best reproduce the exhilaration consequent on emerging from the green luxuriance of semi-tropical vegetation with its steamy hothouse air. It was written from our first resting-place upon the romantic mountain-side.

"WAN NIEN SZE, _July 26th, 1892_.

"With whom do you think we have been lunching to-day? I have had tea with gold-miners in Alaska, and luncheon in a lumber camp in British Columbia, and dinner with a party of Chinese merchants in Chungking; but to-day, of all people in the world, it was with the chief priest of a Buddhist monastery on the sacred mountain of Omi! And very good the luncheon was! I really felt _fed_--always a matter of question when one is living upon tinned things. He did not sit down with us; but he entertained us by his conversation, and we had our own tablecloth and forks and spoons, and our own servant to wait upon us. The room was all set out with red cloths beautifully embroidered in pale blue, hanging on the front of the side-table, over the backs of the chairs, and down from the seats, on which were cool summer cushions. There were twelve courses besides the rice; and quite a number of monks and pilgrims assembled to see us eat. Our room opened into the temple, where Puhsien (gigantic) sat upon the altar on a sort of leopard. I believe some people say Puhsien was the son of Sakyamuni or of Gautama, pronounce them how we will. But the high-priest says, 'Omito Fo!' (Blessed is Fu, or Buddha!) as a greeting, and interlards all his talk with it: 'I am so glad you like your dinner, Omito!' 'We are very poor; we want two hundred thousand tiles to roof the temples, Omito!' etc., etc. We found _beignets_ of pumpkin flowers in dough perfectly delicious. But our man-servant says, 'Yes, but you put in a catty [1⅓ lb.] of flour, and you get only three ounces.'

"It was a regular charity lunch; for directly it was over the high-priest entered into further details,--how the rooms we were lodging in wanted repairing, and how everything did (which is quite true), and how we could see every one who came to worship was very poor, and the last Europeans who lodged there gave about £15, and he thought it would be so nice if we gave £25. And he brought the subscription list out, and the brush to write with; and positively would _not_ let our Boy write down £2 10_s._--twice as large a sum as I thought necessary. Then another priest begged too. They begged and begged, till I said at last, determined to interrupt them, 'There is a Tibetan image in the temple behind I do so want you to come and show me.' Then every one burst out laughing at such a very palpable attempt to change the conversation. However, our modest sum got written down, and the chief priest nearly wept. He came to show us the Tibetan image, and he seemed to find it absolutely uninteresting. It holds a little white rabbit in one hand, and a rosary with very large beads in the other, and looks as conceited as it is possible to look. But as he said it was made on the mountain and not in Tibet, we did not photograph it and him together.

"As far as we can make out, this mountain was sacred long before Buddhism; and every day crowds of pilgrims come--numbers of Chinese women, with their bandaged feet wrapped up in husks of Indian corn to make it easier to walk up the steep flights of steps that lead up ten thousand feet to the top of the mountain. How they manage it, I cannot think. The saying is, 'If you are a bad man with sins unrepented, and go up the mountain, you die.' Six men are said to have thus died this year. There is a wonderful bronze Puhsien riding on a colossal bronze elephant, beautifully made, each of its feet standing on a lotus flower. This is in a temple just behind ours, with a dome, and made of bricks, both very unusual in China, and said here never to have been built, but to have come in a single night.

"But I cannot tell you how I wish to get away from all these temples. They begin to oppress me so,--all the people prostrating themselves, and then offering incense before each image in turn (and there are so many!), and lighting a candle before each. They arrive with great baskets full. And they come out of the temple with a rapt expression. And then our white long-haired terrier springs out on them, and they start so! We do not know what to do; because they call him a lion-dog (he is the Chinese idea of a lion), and seem to regard him as a semi-sacred thing. I do not want him to go into the temples at all. And the thresholds are so high he cannot get over; but there is always some one who will hand him over, and then the conceited dog shakes his sides and frisks about among the worshippers. This worship has been going on for thousands of years; and yet I do not believe any one has an idea about Puhsien!

"Then there is Kwanyin over and over again, like a Byzantine Virgin and Child, with a very sweet face on this mountain, and a child on her knee. And women come and pray for children, and carry away little dolls. The more I think of it, the less I know what I believe about it all. Nara, where they had worshipped for so many years in Japan, seemed to be haunted. But this mountain does not feel haunted, nor as yet does it feel sacred. But so far we are only up three thousand feet, with mosquitoes all alive about us, and scissor-grinders shrilling their souls out in just, I should think, the highest note possible for the human ear to hear, besides others more like other scissor-grinders.

"Then, though this temple seemed clean on first arrival by comparison with Chinese inns, its dirt now has a very materialising effect upon one's susceptibilities. It is beautifully situated on a spur of the mountain, with an amphitheatre of mountain-peaks girdling it in except on one side, where it looks down on the lesser hills and rivers we came up from. There are trees, and, we are assured, tigers, a man having been eaten by one ten days ago. But as I am also told eight men together were going up a peak not far from here, and of the eight five were killed by tigers, I am not quite sure whether one can believe everything one is told on Omi-shan. At all events, the tiger-mosquitoes seem a more real danger at present. We had sixteen nights in Chinese inns to get here from Chungking, travelling always westward; so I cannot think many Europeans will come, till there are steamers running to Chungking, and Cook has organised through-tickets. But the chief priest thinks if he could only do these rooms up many foreigners would come, and all give him many taels, and then the temples could all be restored."

There are many wonders upon this sacred mountain, one the so-called Glory of Buddha, which we saw every afternoon during the fortnight in August we spent on its summit. Another, more puzzling to me, we only saw once. We were called out about nine o'clock on a keen, frosty night to see the lamps of Kiating, the city ten thousand feet below us, that had come up to be lighted. Some rich donor has given the lamps of Kiating particularly high lamp-posts to facilitate this miracle. Certainly, on each out-jutting spur of the mountain, as we looked down from the edge of the great precipice, we saw a large luminous light apparently quite stationary, and in effect recalling the lamps of Piccadilly at night. Some people say this must be caused by electricity. Certainly, on Mount Omi we always seemed to look down upon the storms of thunder and lightning that evening after evening cooled the hot country below us. But the most beautiful sight was to turn away from the grand views as far as the eye could reach over the rivers and hills and cities of China, and, standing on the verge of the precipice, look just in the other direction, across the sea of mountains with serrated edges or slanting-backs, two flat-topped table-mountains conspicuous among them, till there at last up in the sky, "as if stood upon a table for us to look at," as some Chinaman said centuries ago, stood the long range of the snowy giants of Tibet, with great glaciers clinging to their sides, and catching the first rosy light of morning, whilst all the other intervening mountains were still wrapped in their blankets of mist and night.

Many beautiful descriptions have been written of Mount Omi, that mountain that stands alone in its sacredness in the far west of China, with an all-round view from its summit, where the beholder stands on the verge of one of the most gigantic precipices in the world, said by Mr. Baber to be a mile deep. But it would be hard to surpass that of Fan Yü-tsz, of the Ming Dynasty, who tells how he saw the Wa-wu, and the snowy mountains "running athwart like a long city wall," and India, and the mountains of Karakorum, together with all the barbarous kingdoms, the great Min River, and the rivers of Kiating, the Tung, and the Ya; and winds up by saying: "The advocate and I clapped our palms, and cried out, 'The grandest view of a lifetime!'" The cloud effects from Fujiyama's top are different, but not finer; and Fuji has no snowy mountains of Tibet to look out upon. The all-round view from the ever popular and most beloved Rigi seems a plaything sort of pretty pigmy view by comparison.

And day after day, year after year, all the year round, pilgrims come and prostrate themselves on the different out-jutting bastions of the cliff upon boards laid in the wet grass for their convenience while they venerate Puhsien, who, they say, came up from India on his elephant and settled here; just as their ancestors probably came, before ever Buddha was, to venerate the sun-god, as we call him now, we not apparently having even yet learnt enough to say simply God, as if there were, or could be, God this and God that,--not one God, the Father of All--to use the simple comprehensive Chinese phrase, "The Above All!" The men and women of the province come in great numbers: the men with their brows bound with the white Szechuan handkerchief like Dante, and with mouths like the old Greek gods, with rich, regular curves; the women with their skirts only to their knees, and feet of the natural size or only slightly deformed, and in each case bound with Indian corn-husks, the better to contend with the steep stone steps that lead up and down the ten thousand feet of mountain-side. Men from Yunnan come too, with extraordinarily heavy and knotted young trees for walking-sticks, shod, not with iron points, but small iron spades, that they may if need be re-make the road as they go along. Military dandies even from far Ningpo are carried up the mountain in sedan-chairs (this last a work of great difficulty); whilst old men and very weak women manage to get up in a sort of basket carried on a man's back, their feet holding on round his waist after the fashion that children are carried pick-a-back. And in the winter the Tibetans come, men and women all together, all in furs, and saying, "Om Mani Padmi Hum!" instead of the familiar, "Omito Fo," the habitual greeting on the mountain-side. Some of the wild tribes also come, without pigtails, like decent people, but with their hair strangely sticking out in front of their heads, as if they wore their tails in front. And all prostrate themselves, and do reverence--_unless_ it be the few Europeans who have strayed so far west through China--as they look over the edge of the great precipice, and there on the mist below see the circular halo of three primary colours, very brilliant, and in its central brightness the shadow of their own head and shoulders, or, if their heart be such, Puhsien himself riding on his elephant, as he came from India more than two thousand years ago. Where the pilgrims most do congregate some pious donor has had strong iron chains fastened between iron supports; and in another place there is a low stone wall: but so great is the indifference to its depth that so lofty a precipice inspires,--we ourselves once resided on a fifth story, and found many of our visitors unable to look out, and ourselves suffered somewhat from dizziness; but on moving to the eleventh floor of the same building felt nothing of the kind,--so great is the indifference to its danger that this great precipice inspires, that not a day passes but people are getting outside the chains, or standing on the top of the low wall, the better to see down below.

And there, as we look down upon the beautiful trees far beneath us, and the flowers finding here and there a foothold, we become aware of a cave, that looks quite inaccessible now, although it may not always have been so; and below the cave, just a little way farther down the precipice, something--we cannot quite make out what. We saw it from the first, and then turned away to look at the city of Kiating, picturesquely situated at the junction of its three rivers, or to notice how swollen the rivers are with the recent heavy rains, or to catch a distant glimpse of the one Taoist monastery on the mountain, perched like an eyrie on its most picturesque out-jutting spur, or, as so often, to watch the mist roll up. Oftenest it comes flying up from the hot lowlands at our feet; but at times it crawls up like a great white bear, lifting first one paw, then another, yet always securing its foothold even on the sheerest edge of the precipice. At other times it comes up like a sinuous serpent; and sometimes, enfolding all the landscape, it flows over the precipice from the top like a Niagara of mist. But always as the mist lifts, and we lean over the precipice, scanning closely, we see that cave, which surely no man could ever reach, and, below, something curious lying aslant on an edge of the cliff; yet never is our curiosity sufficiently awakened to lift an opera-glass, and see what it may be: it looks so small and insignificant--just something out of place in the vast landscape, that is all.

Then we see other caves, and hear wild talk of aborigines, who live, or lived, in them. The coolies talk of nothing but aborigines and the unconquered Lolos. One of them has been two years among the latter as a soldier; and he tells how his general's wife was taken prisoner by them, and put upon an ox to ride, since she could not walk, and describes them as a sort of Highlanders, wearing a skirt and a wrap, and not rude at all to those they carry off--only wanting to get ransom-money. Then we meet a pilgrim, who is standing staring at some caves far below with protruding eyes; and he says, "There are tigers in there!" then stands speechless. But on our laughing we are told again of six men already this year eaten by tigers. It is a comfort to laugh even over tigers; for the high, rare air affects the nerves even of our coolies, and every one is asking for quinine as a cure for neuralgia. For foreign medicines are known in the West, and "They never cost anything," as some women with a sick child said with great energy, and confidence that we must be able to cure the child, and for nothing, as missionaries or foreigners (here the two words are treated as synonymous) always did. Then, as one coolie after another sickened, and we ourselves could hardly breathe or bear the aching of our heads, we were told a very dangerous air came up over the precipice, and how a Taoist priest, who was going to live in a cave on the mountain, dropped down dead of it. And none of our Chinese would hear of a cave being possibly full of gas, or that the air on the top of the mountain was so much lighter than that below that a little time is needed to get accustomed to it.

And whilst explaining scraps of modern science, we forgot all about the Taoist priest who died, till one day again we were hanging over the cliff, watching for the Glory of Buddha below, when we noted a Chinaman gazing down more intently than devoutly. "Do you see him?" he asked. "I could not find him this morning; and I would not believe what they all said, that a Taoist priest lay there. But what else can it be? Do you look through your far-seeing glass, and say what you see." So we looked at that something out of place, that had at once caught short-sighted eyes intently scanning, yet without arresting our attention sufficiently even to wonder what it might be. Yes! certainly there lay, across a fallen tree, what looked like a man with a hood on, like that the chief priest here wore, with an old basket at his feet. "Yes, that's it--that's it. All the Taoists wear that! With his feet in a basket! That is how they say he lies. He has lain there two years, they say; and last year his clothes looked blue, and now they look whitey-brown. Next year, I suppose, they will all fall to pieces. I suppose it must be a man. I would not believe it at first." "No, no; it is not a Taoist priest," said the young Buddhist, whose duty it was to be agreeable to visitors. "It is just some clothes people have thrown down." But, in the first place, no human hand could throw clothes so far. They must long before have, fluttering, caught upon some rugged edge. Next, nothing thrown could so exactly take the semblance of a man,--the hood worn just as the chief priest wears his, only the head fallen forward somewhat, and the lower part of the person in dust-coloured clothes evidently fast approaching decay, but even yet lingering on just where they would be if a man lay there wearing them. The idea of clothes thrown down certainly would not hold water. The idea of a sort of Guy Fawkes figure did at one time present itself; but whilst it seemed possible that some enthusiast might attempt to climb to that inaccessible cave, and so climbing fall and perish, it did not seem possible that any one would be foolhardy enough to climb there for the purpose merely of placing a lay figure there, or could do so, carrying a lay figure. Yet, not wishing to be too credulous, we approached the chief priest the next time his picturesque figure in grey silk gown and black hood appeared beside the parapet, and propounded the theory of clothes. His dark eyes grew luminous with a sad smile; his is a face in which a painter would delight, with its rich dark shades, well-marked features, and general air of an Oriental saint of the early Christian era. "Those are no clothes," he said, sadly smiling. "A Taoist priest lies there."

And could there be a grander grave for a dead man,--the great white mists of Omi his winding-sheet, the Glory of Buddha floating above him his memorial cross, the bosom of Omi's inaccessible precipice his last resting-place? Year by year, day by day, pilgrims kneel, and knock their foreheads on the ground, then hold out hands of supplication over his prostrate form; the bells are struck, the prayers are chanted, the incense burns, above the unburied priest's last resting-place. Never now will hand of man touch him more. He lies secure. He sought to pass away from the contamination of the world, and in pure ecstasy of devotion pass his days in an untrodden cave. And it seems that God--our God, his God, the Lord and Father of us all--accepted the offering without requiring the year-long daily sacrifice. There are no signs of struggle in the orderly disposed garments. It seems as if his spirit passed away as his foot stumbled, and he fell across the fallen tree.

And to make it grander still, he has won no immortal name thereby. The young priest in the temple on the summit says, "That is no unburied saint lies there--only clothes!" He takes us to a neighbouring shrine of his own faith to see a real unburied saint. As we ascended the mountain, we were struck by an image upon an altar from its likeness to a man in its little human imperfections, all covered with gilding though it was, as well as decked out in somewhat tawdry bright embroidered satins. We only noticed, and passed on, repelled by a large and really rather offensively ugly representation of Puhsien standing behind it. The front figure was seated on a large lotus flower, with its legs tucked up underneath it, just as the chief priest at our temple tucked up his legs when he sat to have his photograph taken, putting on his best vestments for the purpose, and looking no longer like an early Christian, without his hood, and with his bald shining head. "There! that was a priest here in the time of Kang Hsi," said the young priest. "It is his very body, not embalmed. It would not decay, and so he was----" Now, did he say _canonised_? "Few foreigners know of this----" Now, did he say God or saint? So much turns upon a word sometimes, and so few foreigners know Chinese well enough to be clear about these delicate distinctions.

A set of dandies in rich-coloured silks from Kiating, with yellow incense-bags and double purses, invaded the temple, not for the purpose of staring, as we were doing, but to worship. They prostrated themselves, burnt their joss-sticks, and struck the gong before the gilded old man upon the altar just in the same way that they did before the other images. And they looked so picturesque doing this, it seemed a pity to wait to set up the camera till they had gone, and then only to photograph the gilded old man upon the altar and the priest of seventy-one of to-day who ministers before it. The living old man was quite excited by the proceeding, and completely unaware that photography demanded the posture, generally most congenial to a Chinaman, of repose.

Even through all his gilding, the face of the other old man upon the altar gave an idea of holiness, and this in spite of his having as typically slanting eyes as any Chinaman living. Some of his teeth were gone, and his mouth had a little helpless sort of crookedness about it that was very touching. It seemed impossible then and there to hear anything of his history; but it seemed equally impossible, looking at him, to doubt that he had been a good man, a Vicar of Wakefield simple sort of good man, and probably deserved as well to have his body set upon an altar and worshipped as any mere man might. But the place of sepulture of the unburied Taoist priest strikes the imagination as far finer, recalling the grand lines upon the burial of Moses. Angels bore Moses to his sepulchre, we are told. No one has borne the Taoist priest. Even the winds of heaven cannot touch him, as he lies sheltered by the great precipice on which he perished.

"Stars silent rest o'er him, Graves under him silent.

* * * * *

Here eyes do regard him In eternity's stillness."

Thus, at but a little distance from each other, on the summit of the sacred mountain of Omi, in this land where more importance is attached to burial than in any other, two Chinamen await unburied the consummation of all things,--the one a disciple of Buddha; the other, of that even less known Laotze, Buddha's Chinese contemporary: the one covered over with gilding, raised upon an altar, and certainly apparently worshipped as a god; the other lying prone upon the mountain-side, his poor perishable garments growing threadbare in the snow and rain. But when the mists gather round the mountain-top, and the sun shines slanting from the west, it is above the ardent disciple of Laotze that the Glory of Buddha floats--the man who sought the grimmest possible retreat from the snares of this world, and, thus seeking, found, we trust, the joys of Paradise.