Part 2

The hall is high and spacious. Four or five colossal gilded statues dominate the background. The largest is seated on a throne in the middle. His eyes and mouth are closed, his feet drawn under him, and one hand, held in the “gesture of witness,” points to the earth. Thus, under the sacred tree, the perfect Buddha conceived himself. Escaped from the wheel of life, he participates in his own Nirvana. Others perched above him, with downcast eyes, contemplate their navels. These are the Heavenly Buddhas seated on lotus flowers. They are Avalokhita, Amitabha, the Buddha of the Light without Measure and the Buddha of the Paradise of the West. At their feet the bonzes pursue their rites. They have gray robes; large, somewhat rust-colored mantles attached to the shoulder like togas; leggings of white linen; and, some of them, a sort of mortar-board on their heads. Others bare their scalps, where the white marks of _moxas_ show the number of their vows. One by one, murmuring, they file past. The last who passes is a boy of twelve years. By a side hall I reach the third court and see a third temple.

Four priests perched on stools are ranged inside the door. Their shoes are left on the earth before them; and without the need of feet, detached, imponderable, they are seated on their own thoughts. They make no movement. Their mouths, their closed eyes, are one with the creases and wrinkles in the wasted flesh of their faces, like the scar of the navel. Consciousness of their inertia is sufficient for their ruminating intelligence. Under a niche in the middle of the hall, I distinguish the shining limbs of another Buddha. A confused company of idols is ranged in the obscurity along the walls.

Returning, I see the central temple from the rear. High on the wall of an embrasure a many-colored tympan represents some legend among olive-trees. I re-enter. The back of the repository where the colossi are exposed is a great painted sculpture: Amitofou mounting to Heaven amid flames and demons. The setting sun, passing through the trellised openings high in the wall, sweeps the somber boxlike hall with horizontal rays.

The bonzes continue the ceremony. Kneeling now before the colossi, they are intoning a chant, while the celebrant, standing before a bell shaped like a cask, leads the measured beat of drums and bells. At each verse he clashes the drum, drawing from its brazen belly a re-echoing vibration. Then, facing each other in two lines, they recite some litany.

The side buildings are the dwellings of the priests. One of them enters, carrying a pail of water. I glance into the refectory where the bowls of rice are placed two by two on the empty tables.

I am again before the tower.

Just as the pagoda expresses, by its system of courts and buildings, the extent and the dimensions of Space; so the tower symbolizes Height. Poised against the sky, it becomes the scale of it. The seven octagonal stories are a plan of the seven mystic heavens. The architect has narrowed their corners and lifted their borders with skill. Each story casts its own shadow below it. At every angle of every roof a bell is attached, and beside it hangs the clapper with which to strike it. Their metallic syllables are the mysterious voice of each Heaven, and their unuttered sound hangs suspended like a drop.

I have nothing more to say of the pagoda. I do not know its name.

THE CITY AT NIGHT

It is raining softly. The night has come. The policeman takes the lead and turns to the left, ceasing his talk of the time when, as a kitchen-boy in the invading army, he saw his Major installed in the sanctuary of the “God of Long Life.” The road that we follow is mysterious. By a series of alleys, of passages, stairs, and doorways, we come out in the court of the temple, where buildings with clawlike copings and hornlike peaks make a black frame to the night sky. A smoldering fire flickers from the dark doorway. We penetrate the blackness of the hall.

The cave is filled with incense, glowing with red light. One cannot see the ceiling. A wooden grille separates the idol from his clients, and from the table of offerings, where garlands of fruit and bowls of food are deposited. The bearded face of a giant image can be vaguely distinguished. The priests are dining, seated about a round table. Against the wall is a drum as enormous as a tun, and a great gong in the form of the ace of spades. Two red tapers, like square columns, lose themselves in the smoke and the night, where vague pennants float.

Onward!

The narrow tangle of streets, where we are involved in the midst of a shadowy crowd, is lit only by the deep open booths which border it. These are the work-rooms of carpenters, engravers; the shops of tailors, shoemakers, and venders of fur. From innumerable kitchens, behind the display of bowls of noodles and soup, the sound of frying escapes. In a dark recess some woman attends a crying child. Among stacked-up coffins is the gleam of a pipe. A lamp, a sidewise flicker, shows strange medleys. At the street corners, at the bends of heavy little stone bridges, in niches behind iron bars, dwarfish idols can be seen between two red candles. After a long progress under the rain, in the darkness and filth, we find ourselves suddenly in a yellow blind alley which a big lantern lights with a brutal flare. Color of blood, color of pestilence, the high walls of the dungeon where we are have been daubed with an ocher so red that it seems of itself to irradiate light. The door at our left is simply a round hole.

We reach a court. Here is another temple. It is a shadowy hall from which exudes an odor of earth. It is enriched with idols, which, disposed in two rows around three sides of the place, brandish swords, lutes, roses, and branches of coral. They tell us that these are the years of human life. While I try to find the twenty-seventh, I am left behind; and, before leaving, the fancy takes me to look into a niche that I find on the further side of the door. A brown demon with four pairs of arms, his face convulsed by rage, is hidden there like an assassin.

Forward! The roads become more and more miserable. We go past high palisades of bamboo; and at last, emerging from the southern gate, we turn toward the east. The road follows the base of a high crenellated wall. On the other hand sink the deep trenches of a dried river-bed. Below we see sampans lit by cooking fires. A shadowy people swarm there like the spirits of the Inferno.

And undoubtedly this lamentable river-bank marks the end planned for our exploration, because we retrace our steps. City of Lanterns, we gaze again upon the chaos of thy ten thousand faces!

Seeking an explanation, a reason why this town where we loitered is so distinct in our memories, we are struck at once with this fact: there are no horses in the streets. The city is entirely of human beings. It seems an article of faith with the Chinese not to employ an animal or a machine for work by which a man may live. This explains the narrowness of the streets, the stairs, the curved bridges, the houses without fences, the sinuous windings of the alleys and passages. The city forms a coherent whole, an industrious honeycomb communicating in all its parts, perforated like an ant-hill. When the night comes, every one barricades himself. During the day there are no doors, that is to say no doors that close. The door here has no official function. It is simply an opening. Not a wall but can by some fissure give passage to an agile and slender person. The large streets necessary to general traffic, and to an ordered mechanical life, would be of no use here. Here merely collective alleys and passages are provided.

An opium den, a market of prostitutes, these last fill the framework of my memory. The smoking den is a vast nave, empty all the height of two stories which superimpose their balconies inside. The building is full of blue smoke, one breathes an odor of burning chestnuts. It is a heavy perfume, powerful, stagnant, strong as the beat of a gong. Sepulchral smoke, it establishes between our air and dreams a middle atmosphere which the seeker of these mysteries inhales. One sees across the haze the fire of little opium lamps like the souls of the smokers. Later they will arrive in greater numbers. Now it is too early.

On narrow benches, their heads helmed with flowers and pearls, clothed in wide blouses of silk and full embroidered trousers, motionless, with their hands on their knees, the prostitutes wait in the street like beasts at a fair, in the pell-mell and the dust of passers-by. Beside their mothers and dressed like them, also motionless, little girls are seated on the same bench. Behind, a flare of petrol lights the opening to the stairway.

I go. And I carry the memory of a life congested, naïve, restless; of a city at the same time open and crowded, a single house with a multifold family. I have seen the city of other days, when, free of modern influences, men swarmed in an artless disorder; in fact it is the fascination of all the past that I am leaving, when, issuing out of the double gate in the hurly-burly of wheelbarrows and litters, in the midst of lepers and epileptics, I see the electric lights of the Concession shine.

GARDENS

It is half-past three: white mourning.[A] The sky is veiled as if with white linen. The air is moist and raw. I go into the city. I am looking for gardens.

I walk in a black gravy. Along the ditch whose crumbling border I follow, the odor is so strong that it is like an explosive. There is the smell of oil, garlic, filth, ashes, opium, and offal. I walk amid a free and easy people who are shod with thick buskins or sandals of straw, wearing long hoods or skullcaps of felt, their silk or linen trousers tucked into leggings.

The wall winds and undulates, and its coping, an arrangement of bricks and open-work tiles, imitates the back and body of a crawling dragon. A sort of head terminates it, from which floats a cloud of smoke. This is the place. I knock mysteriously at a little black door which opens. Under the overhanging roofs I cross a succession of vestibules and narrow corridors. I am in a strange place.

It is a garden of stones.... Like the ancient Italian and French designers, the Chinese have understood that a garden, from the fact of its inclosure, must be complete in itself and harmonious in all its parts. Only so will nature adapt herself to our moods, and only so, by a subtle harmony, will the master feel at home wherever he looks. Just as a landscape does not consist simply of its grass and the color of its foliage, but is distinguished by its outlines and the slope of the ground, so the Chinese literally construct their gardens with stones. They are sculptors instead of painters. Because it is susceptible of elevation and depth, of contours and reliefs, through the variety of its planes and surfaces, stone seems to them a more suitable medium for creating a background for Man than are plants, which they reduce to their normal place of decoration and ornament.

Nature herself has prepared the materials. The hand of Time, the frost, the rain, wear away, work at the rock; perforating it, gashing it, probing it with a searching finger. Faces, animals, skeletons, hands, shells, bodies without heads, petrified wood like a congealed mass of broken figures, mingled with leaves and fishes; Chinese art seizes all these strange objects, imitates them, and arranges them with an ingenious industry.

This garden represents a mountain cleft by a precipice, to which steep paths give access. Its feet bathe in a little lake half covered with green scum, where a zigzag bridge completes the bias outline. Built upon a foundation of pink granite piles, the tea-house mirrors in the greenish black waters of the basin its soaring double roofs, which seem to lift it from the earth like outspread wings.

Below, driven straight into the earth like iron candlesticks, the stripped trees bar the sky, their giant stature dominating the garden. I wander among the stones by a long labyrinth whose windings and turnings, ascents and evasions, amplify and complicate the scene, simulating the mazes of a dream around the lake and the mountain. Finally I attain the kiosk on the summit. The garden seems to sink below me like a valley full of temples and pavilions, and among the trees appears the poem of the roofs.

They are high and low, detached and massed, elongated like a pediment or swelling like a bell. They are surmounted with ornamental friezes decorated with centipedes and fishes. At the intersections of their ridges the peaks display stags, storks, altars, vases, and wingèd pomegranates--all symbolic. The roofs, lifted up at the corners like arms which hold up a too ample robe, have a creamy whiteness or the blackness of soot yellowed and sodden. The air is green, as when one looks through old window-glass.

The other slope brings us before the great pavilion. The descent winds slowly toward the lake by irregular steps leading to other surprises. Coming out of an alley, I see pointing in disorder toward the sky five or six horns of a roof whose building is hidden from me. Nothing could paint the drunken toss of these fairy prows, the proud elegance of these flowering stalks, holding up a lily to the envious clouds. Bourgeoning with this flower, the strong framework lifts itself like a branch that one lets spring.

I reach the border of the pond where the stalks of dead lotus flowers lie across the still waters. The silence is as profound as the depth of a winter forest. This harmonious place was built for the pleasure of the members of a Syndicate of Commerce in beans and rice, who doubtless come here in the spring nights to drink tea and watch the shore glimmer under the moon.

The other garden is more singular.

It was almost night when, penetrating into its square enclosure, I saw it filled to its walls with a vast landscape. Picture a mass of rocks, a chaos, a confusion of overthrown blocks, heaped up together as if by the force of the sea; a vision of madness, a country as ghastly as a brain with its convolutions bared. The Chinese flay their landscapes. Inexplicable as nature, this little corner seems also as vast and as complex. Among these rocks rises a dark and twisted pine-tree. The warped trunk, the color of its bristling tufts, the violent dislocation of its limbs, the disproportion of this single tree with the artificial country which it dominates,--like a dragon issuing from the earth in smoke, combating the wind and the storms,--make this place unreal, render it grotesque and fantastic. Here and there funereal foliage, yews and arbor-vitæ, in their vigorous blackness, intensify this cataclysm. In my amazement I ponder this melancholy document. And in the middle of the enclosure one great rock stands in the dusk of twilight like a monster,--a theme of reverie and enigma.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] White is the color of Chinese mourning.

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD IN THE SEVENTH MONTH

Ingots of paper are the money of the dead. From thin cards are cut the figures of persons, houses, and animals. The dead man must be followed by these fragile imitations, these patterns of living things; and, if burned, they will accompany him where he goes. The flute guides such souls, the beat of a gong assembles them like bees. In the shadowy darkness, the brilliance of a flame soothes and satisfies them.

Along the bank of the river the prepared barges wait for the night to come. Scarlet tinsel is fastened to the end of a pole; and, whether the river at this turning seems to derive the color of its waters from a leaden sky, or whether it moves its swarming life mysteriously under accumulated clouds,--still the torches flare at the prow, the festoons of lanterns toss from the mast, brightening the gloom with a vivid note,--as a candle held in the hand in a spacious room lightens the solemn emptiness of the night. Meanwhile the signal is given, the flutes shrill out, the gong sounds, firecrackers explode, the three boatmen lean to the long scull. The barge starts and tacks, leaving in the wide sweep of its rudder a trail of fire. Some one is strewing little lamps. Uncertain glimmers on the vast flow of the opaque waters, these flicker a moment and perish. An arm seizes the tinsel streamer, the ball of fire which sinks and flares in the smoke, and touches them to the tomb of the waters; the illusory brightness of the light, like the gleaming of fish, fascinates the cold drowned. Other illuminated barges go and come. Far off are heard detonations, and on the war-ships two bugles, answering one another, sound together the extinguishing of the fires.

The loitering stranger who, from the shore, contemplates the vast night open before him like a chart, will hear the return of the religious barge. The torches are extinguished, the shrill hautboy has died away, but, over a precipitate beating of drumsticks, dominated by a continual rolling of drums, the funereal gong continues its tumult and its dance. Who is it that beats? The sound rises and falls, ends, recommences, and presently swells to a clamor as if impatient hands beat on the metal hung between two worlds. Then solemnly, beneath the measured strokes, the gong returns a deep reverberation. The boat approaches. It passes the river-bank and the fleet of moored craft; and now, in the heavy darkness of the opium barges, it is at my feet. I can see nothing; but the funeral orchestra, which had died away for a long interval, now, after the fashion of dogs that howl, explodes again in the darkness.

This is the feast of the seventh month when the earth enters into its repose. Along the road the rickshaw-runners have stuck in the earth between their feet sticks of incense and little red candle-ends. I must return. Tomorrow I shall come to sit in the same place. It is all over; and still, like the sightless dead sunk beneath an infinity of waves, I hear the tone of the sepulchral sistrum, the clamor of iron drums beaten with terrible blows in the close darkness.

THOUGHTS ON THE SEA

The boat makes her way between the islands; the sea is so calm that it scarcely seems to exist. Eleven o’clock in the morning, and it is hard to tell whether or not it is raining.

The thoughts of the voyager turn to the past year. He sees again his trip across the ocean in the stormy night; the ports, the stations, the arrival on Shrove Sunday, the trip to the house when, with a cold eye, he scanned the sordid festivities of the crowd through the mud-spattered windows of his carriage. His thoughts show him again his parents, his friends, old scenes,--and then the new departure. Unhappy retrospect! As if it were possible for anyone to retrieve his past.

It is this that makes the return sadder than the departure. The voyager re-enters his home as a guest. He is a stranger to all, and all is strange to him. (Servant, hang up the traveling cloak and do not carry it away! Soon it will be necessary to depart once more.) Seated at the family table he is a suspected guest, ill at ease. No, parents, it is never the same! This is a passer-by whom you have received, his ears filled with the fracas of trains and the clamor of the sea, like a man who imagines that he still feels beneath his feet the profound movement that lures him away. He is not the same man whom you conducted to the fateful wharf. The separation has taken place and he has entered upon the exile that follows it!

CITIES

As there are books on beehives, on colonies of birds’ nests, or on the constitution of coral islands, why should we not study thus the cities of humanity?

Paris, the capital of the Kingdom, uniform and concentric in its development, expands, as it grows, into a larger likeness of the island to which it was once confined. London is a juxtaposition of stores, warehouses, and factories. New York is a railway terminal, built of houses between tracks. It is a pier for landing, a great jetty flanked by wharves and warehouses. Like the tongue, which receives and divides its food, like the uvula at the back of the throat placed between two channels, New York, between her two rivers, the North and the East, has set her docks and her storehouses on one side, Long Island; on the other, by Jersey City and the dozen railway lines which range their depots on the embankment of the Hudson, she receives and sends out the merchandise of all the Western continent. The active part of the city, composed entirely of banks, exchanges, and offices, is on the tip of this tongue, which--not to push this figure too far--moves incessantly from one end to the other.

Boston is composed of two parts: the new city, pedantic and miserly, like a man who, displaying his riches and his virtue, yet guards them for himself,--where the streets, open on all sides to avenues, seem to become more silent and longer in the cold, and to listen with more spite to the step of the passer-by who follows them, grinding his teeth in the blast; and the hill where the old city, like a snail-shell, contains all the windings of traffic, debauchery, and hypocrisy.

The streets of Chinese cities are made for a people accustomed to walking in single file; each individual takes his place in an interminable, endless line. Between the houses resembling boxes with one side knocked out, where the inhabitants sleep pell-mell among the merchandise, these narrow fissures are insinuated.

Are there not special points for study? The geometry of streets, the measurement of turnings, the calculus of crowded thoroughfares, the disposition of avenues? Is not all movement parallel to these, and all rest or pleasure perpendicular?

A book indeed!

THE THEATER

The palace of the Corporation of Canton has a niche for its golden god,--an inner hall where great seats, placed solemnly about the center, indicate rather than invite repose. And, as European clubs would place a library, they have established a theater, with parade and pomp, on the far side of the court which is in front of the whole building. It is a terrace of stone deep in between two buildings. Consisting only of a difference in level, the stage between the wings and the crowd is simply a wide, flat space above their heads. A square canopy like that of a dais shades and consecrates it. Another portico in the foreground, framing it in four pillars of granite, confers on it solemnity and distance. Here comedy develops, legends are told, the vision of the things which are to be reveals itself in rolling thunder.

The curtain, comparable to that veil which divides us from the world of dreams, does not exist here. But as if each soul, in discarding its disguises, were held in an impenetrable tissue, whose colors and elusive brightness are like the livery of night; each actor in his silken draperies shows nothing of himself but the movement when he stirs. Beneath the plumage of his part the golden headdress, the face hidden under rouge and mask, he is no more than a gesture and a voice. The emperor mourns over his lost kingdom, the unjustly accused princess flees from monsters and savages, armies defile, combats take place, a gesture effaces years and distances, debates proceed before the elders, the gods descend, the genie arises from the jar. But never does any one of the persons engaged in the execution of a chant or of a complicated dance deviate from the rhythm and the harmonies which time the measure and rule the evolutions, any more than he would throw off his clothes.