Category: Science-Fiction & Fantasy
This book is only an attempt to reproduce, in words, experiences that have come in contemplating the landscapes, flowers and figures in Chinese pictures and on their porcelain. It is the story of a human mind that follows the mysterious and half-wanton beckonings of such an ex...
This book is only an attempt to reproduce, in words, experiences that have come in contemplating the landscapes, flowers and figures in Chinese pictures and on their porcelain....
2. Part 2“Pink-cheeked Ambrose, rosy-fingered Ambrose, continent Ambrose, I don’t reconcile anything. I am the only man in this ship who doesn’t reconcile his ideas with one another, the...
3. Part 3“Oddly enough,” said the first officer, “that Chinaman butler and man-of-all-work mentioned to me this morning that he would have no difficulty in getting hold of a thoroughly r...
4. Part 4“Delicious object!” cried Quentin. “Totter, rather, to these arms and the refuge of this beard, which is indeed a better beard than any countryman of yours can produce. For the...
5. Part 5“What does it matter?” asked Lychnis. “I’d like to go on floating for ever among the lotuses, dabbling my hands in the lake, until the world vanished and there was only a single...
6. Part 6“Well, I’ll fish with you. We’ll go right to the other end of the Lake by ourselves and fish all the afternoon. There’s some beauties in here. I saw them swimming past the rock...
7. Part 7“Why? They’re only Chinese. A lot of dirty, hugger-mugger, gibbering Orientals. But let’s go away altogether, if you like. I don’t want to stay. A place like this, where nothing...
8. Part 8“One can invent many things when it is appropriate to invent them,” said Yuan, “and there are several matters on this Rock that may interest you during your visit to our valley.”
9. Part 9She smiled at Ambrose faintly, enigmatically, baffling further inquiry. Strange creature, she seemed to him, neither child nor woman—at any rate half-fairy. “I don’t dare look a...
10. Part 10They shot up and sideways, skirting the trees like a dragon-fly; came down presently at a place where wild beasts drank. He made fast there. She had a curious sensation, she tol...
11. Part 11Soon they were all out on the Lake in a ceremonial barge, towing a cluster of painted boats, and the island became a dark complex in the moonlight, illuminated by the dying refl...
12. Part 12At that moment, indeed, if Terence wanted Ireland, Lychnis wanted England. Hypnotized by the wheeling of the swifts over the elms, she had seen her home, and the pull at her was...
13. Part 13The voice of Yuan replied, “Water-lily.” He was regarding her, she realized, with a keen gaze, more than ordinarily prolonged and remorseless. He held her with his gaze, as if h...
14. Part 14The fountains of Wang’s mirth were too much for him. His bleached and shrunken old body could hardly contain the elemental upwelling. The universe itself laughed at her in his o...
15. Part 15“Do women have the experience of God unless they are in love?” She laughed a little, twisting her fingers among the reeds. “God? It is not a word that means anything. I only had...