Part 3

The orchestra at the back,--which throughout the piece continues its evocatory tumult, as if, like swarms of bees that reassemble at the beating of a caldron, the scenic phantoms would dissipate if there were silence,--has less a musical rôle than the service of sustaining the whole, playing (if we may call this prompting music) and answering for a chorus of the populace. It is the music which accelerates or moderates the movement, which heightens with an accent more acute the discourse of the actor, or which, surging up behind him, brings to his ears clamor and rumor. There are guitars, bits of wood that are beaten like tympans, that are clashed like castanets; a sort of monochord violin which, like a fountain in a solitary court, by the thread of its plaintive melody, carries the development of the elegy; and finally, in the heroic movements, the trumpet. It is a sort of bugle of brass, of which the sound, charged with harmonies, has an incredible brilliance and a terrible stridence. It is like the braying of an ass, like a shout in the desert, a flourish to the sun, the clamor volleyed from the diaphragm of an elephant. But the gongs and cymbals hold the principal place. Their discordant racket excites and stimulates the emotions, deafening thought, which in a sort of dream sees only the spectacle before it. Meanwhile at one side of the scene, hung in a cage of woven rushes, are two birds like turtledoves. These it seems are _pelitze_ brought from Tientsin. Competing innocently with the uproar in which they bathe, they jet a song of celestial sweetness.

The hall under the second portico, and the entire court, is stuffed as full as a pie with living heads. Among them emerge the pillars, and two lions of sandstone with froglike jaws whose heads are bonneted with children. It is a pavement of skulls and round yellow faces, so closely packed that the limbs and bodies cannot be seen. Pressed together, the hearts of the crowd beat one against the other. It oscillates with but one movement. Sometimes, stretching a row of arms, it surges against the stone wall of the stage; sometimes, withdrawing, is hidden by the sides. In the upper galleries, the wealthy and the mandarins smoke their pipes and drink tea in cups with brass saucers, surveying like gods both spectacle and spectators. As the actors themselves are hidden in their robes, so, as it enters each bosom, does the drama stir under the living stuff of the crowd.

TOMBS AND RUMORS

We climb and then descend; we pass by the great banyan which, like Atlas, settling himself powerfully on his contorted haunches, seems awaiting with knee and shoulder the burden of the sky. At his feet there is a little edifice where are burned all papers marked with black characters, as if a sacrifice of writing was offered to the god of the tree.

We turn and turn again, and by a sinuous road we enter into a country of tombs. Not, indeed, that they were not everywhere, because our steps since our departure have been accompanied by them. The evening star, like a saint praying in solitude, sees the sun disappear beneath her under the deep and diaphanous waters. The funereal region that we scan in the pallid light of a dreary, waning day, is covered with a rude and yellow growth like the pelt of a tiger. From the base to the ridge are hillocks between which our road winds; and, on the opposite side of the valley, as far as the eye can reach, are mountains burrowed like a rabbit-warren with tombs.

In China death holds as great a place as life. As soon as they have gone the dead become more important and more to be suspected, enduring as morose and malevolent powers whom it is well to conciliate. The bonds between the living and the dead are broken with difficulty. The rites continue and are perpetuated. The living must go frequently to the family tomb. They burn incense, fire off crackers, and offer rice and pork. In the shape of a scrap of paper they leave a visiting-card held in place with a pebble. The dead in their thick coffins rest a long time inside the house. Then they are carried out of doors and piled up in low sheds, until the geomancer has found the proper site and location. Then the final resting-place is determined on with great particularity, for fear that the dissatisfied spirits should wander elsewhere. They cut the tombs in the sides of mountains, in the solid and primordial earth; and, while the living, in unhappy multitudes, are crowded in valley-bottoms, in low and malarial plains, the dead open their dwellings to sun and space in high and airy places.

The form of an Omega is chosen, placed flat against the hill-slope; and the semi-circle of stone, completed by the brace, surrounds the dead person, who makes a mount in the center like a sleeper under his coverings. It is thus that the earth, opening her arms, makes him her own and consecrates him to herself. In front is placed the tablet inscribed with the titles and names; because the Chinese believe that certain portions of the soul, that stop to read the name, linger above the tomb. This tablet forms the reredos of a stone altar on which are deposited the symmetrically arranged offerings. In front of this the tomb, by the formal arrangement of its terraces and balustrades, welcomes and receives the living family who go there on solemn days to honor the remains of the deceased ancestor. Primordial and testamentary hieroglyph! Facing it, the hemi-cycle reverberates the invocation. All earth which is above the level of mud is occupied by these vast low tombs, like the openings of pits crammed full. There are little ones, simple ones and elaborate, some new and others which seem as old as the rocks where they lean. The most important are high on the mountain, as if in the folds of its neck. A thousand men together could kneel in this tomb.

I myself live in this country of sepulchers, and by a different road I regain my house on the summit of the hill.

The town is below on the other side of the wide yellow river Min, which precipitates its deep and violent waters between the arches of the Bridge of Ten Thousand Ages. During the day one can see, like the copings of the tombs, the rampart of jagged mountains that enclose the city. The flying pigeons and the tower in the middle of a pagoda make one feel the immensity of this distance. And I can see the two-horned roofs, two wooded hills rising between the houses, and on the river a confusion of wooden rafts and junks whose poops are painted with pictures. But now it is too dark. Scarcely a fire pricks the dusk and the mist beneath me, and by a road I know, slipping into the funereal darkness of the pines, I gain my habitual post, this great triple tomb blackened with moss and age, oxidized like armor, which thrusts its frowning parapet obliquely into space.

I come here to listen.

Chinese cities have neither factories nor vehicles. The only noise that can be heard, when evening comes and the fracas of trade ceases, is the human voice. I come to listen for that; for, when one loses interest in the sense of the words that are offered him, he can still lend them a more subtle ear. Nearly a million inhabitants live here. I listen to the speech of this multitude far under a lake of air. It is a clamor at once torrential and crackling, shot through with sudden abrupt rips like the tearing of paper. I am sure one can distinguish now and then a note and its modulations, as one does a chord on a drum, by putting his fingers on the right places. Has the city a different murmur at different times in the day? I propose to test it. At this moment it is evening. They are volubly publishing the day’s news. Each one believes that he alone is speaking. He recounts quarrels, meals, household happenings, family affairs, his work, his commerce, his politics. But his words do not perish. They carry--part of the innumerable additions to the collective voice. Shorn of their meaning they continue only as the unintelligible elements of the sound which carries them; utterance, intonation, accent. As there is a mingling of sounds, is there a blending of the sense? And what is the grammar of this general discourse? Guest of the dead, I listen long to the murmur, the noise that the living make afar!

Now it is time to return. The pines, between whose high shafts I pursue my road, deepen the shadows of night. It is the hour when one commences to see the fire-flies, hearth fires of the grass. As in the depth of meditation an intuition passes, so quickly that the spirit can perceive merely a glimmer, a sudden indication; so this impalpable crumb of fire burns, and in the same moment is extinguished.

THE ENTRANCE TO THE EARTH

Rather than assail the escarpments of the mountain with the iron point of my stick I should prefer to see, from this low, flat plain across which I wander, the mountains seated around me like a hundred ancient men in the glory of the afternoon. The sun of Pentecost illumines the earth, swept and garnished and impressive as a church. The air is so cool and so clear that it seems as if I walked naked. All is peace. One hears on all sides, like the cry of a flute, the notes of chain-pumps in unison, drawing water from the fields (three by three, the men and women beat upon the triple wheel, their arms hooked to the beam, their laughing faces covered with sweat), and a friendly territory opens before the steps of the walker.

I measure with my eyes the circuit I must follow. I know how, from the top of the mountain, the plain with its fields will resemble an old stained-glass window with irregular panes set in a network of lead. By straight footpaths of the earth that frames the rice-fields, I finally begin on the paved way.

It crosses the rice-fields, the orange groves, the villages,--guarded at one outlet by their great banyan (the Father to whom all the children of the country are brought for adoption) and at the other, not far from the wells of water and pits of manure, by the fane of the local gods who, both armed from head to foot with bow at belly, painted on the gate, roll their tri-colored eyes toward each other. And, as I advance turning my head from right to left, I taste slowly the changes of the hours, because, as a perpetual wayfarer, a wise judge of the length of shadows, nothing of the august ceremony of the day escapes me. Drunk with beholding, I understand it all. This bridge still to cross in the peace of the lunch hour, these hills to climb and to descend, this valley to traverse; and already I see, between three pines, the steep rock where I must take up my post to assist at the crowning ceremony of that which was a day.

It is the moment of solemn reception when the sun crosses the threshold of the earth. Fifteen hours ago it passed the line of the illimitable sea; and, like an eagle resting motionless on its wings to examine the country from afar, it has gained the highest part of the sky. Now it declines its course and the earth opens to receive it. The gorge to which the sun sets its mouth disappears under the level rays as if it were devoured by fire. The mountain where a conflagration has flared up like a crater, sends toward the sky an enormous column of smoke. And below, touched by an oblique ray, the line of a torrent flashes. Behind spreads out the earth of all the earth, Asia with Europe; like the central height of an altar, an immense plain; and then, far beyond that, like a man flat on his face on the water, France; and, in the thickest of France, joyous and fertile Champagne. Only the top of the golden targe can be seen now, and at the moment it disappears the evening star sends across the sky a dark and vertical ray. It is the time when the sea which follows it, lifting itself from its bed with a profound cry, hurls its shoulder against the earth.

Now I must go. So high that I must lift my chin to see it, the summit of Kuchang, detached by a cloud, is hung like an island in the exquisite spaces; and, thinking of nothing else, I walk as though my head were detached from my body,--like a man whom the acidity of too strong a perfume has satiated.

THE RELIGION OF LETTERS

Let others discover in the range of Chinese characters either the head of a sheep, the arms and legs of a man, or the sun setting behind a tree. For my part I seek a more difficult clue.

All writing commences with a symbol or line which, considered as a whole, is a pure characterization of the individual. Either the line is horizontal, like all things which, in simply conforming to the laws of their being, find sufficient reason for existence; or it is vertical, like the tree and the man, indicating acts and laying down affirmations; or, if oblique, it marks movement and the senses.

The Roman letter has had the vertical line for its principle; the Chinese character seems to have the horizontal as its essential trait. The letter with an imperious downstroke affirms that a thing is so; the character is the very thing that it signifies.

One symbol or another is equally a sign. Let us take figures for example. They are all equally abstract images, but the letter is essentially analytic. Each word is an enunciation of successive affirmations that the eye and the voice spell out. Unit is added to unit on the same line, and the Protean syllable changes and is modified in a continual variation. But the Chinese sign develops the figure, and, applying it to a series of beings, it differentiates their characters indefinitely. A word exists by a succession of letters, a character by the relation of its strokes. May we not imagine that in these the horizontal line indicates, for example, the species; the vertical, the individual; the oblique, diverse of movement, that group of traits and energies which gives meaning to the whole; the period, distinct on the white page, signifying something that can only be implied? One can therefore see in the Chinese character a completely developed being, a written person, having, like a person who lives, his nature and his moods, his own acts and his inner individuality, his structure and physiognomy.

This explains the piety with which the Chinese regard writing. They burn with respect the humblest paper marked with a vestige of this mystery. The sign is a being; and, from the fact that it is common to all, it becomes sacred. With them the representation of ideas is almost an idol. Such is the foundation of that scriptural religion which is peculiar to China. Yesterday I visited a Confucian temple.

It was in a solitary quarter where everything spoke of desertion and decay. In the silence and burning heat of the sun at three o’clock, we followed the sinuous street. Our entrance is not to be by the great door where the proud rot in their enclosure, where that high column marked with an official inscription in two languages guards the worn sill. A woman, short and round-backed as a pig, opens a side passage for us; and, with echoing footfalls, we penetrate into the deserted court.

By the proportions of the court and of the peristyles which frame it; by the spacious intercolumniations and the horizontal lines of the façade; by the repetition of the two enormous roofs, which lift their massive black curves with a single sweep; by the symmetrical disposition of the two little pavilions which are before it and which lighten the severity of the whole with the agreeable grotesques of their octagonal roofs; the building (to apply the essential laws of architecture) is given a learned aspect, a classic beauty in short, due to an exquisite observation of rule.

The temple is composed of two parts. I suppose that the passages with their rows of tablets on the walls, each one preceded by a long, narrow altar of stone, offer to a hasty worship the primary series of precepts. Lifting our feet to avoid the sill which it is forbidden to tread upon, we penetrate into the shade of the sanctuary.

The vast high hall has the air of holding an occult presence. It is utterly empty. Here silence sits veiled in obscurity. Here are no ornaments, no statues. On each side of the hall we distinguish, between their curtains, great inscriptions; and, before them, altars; but in the middle of the temple, behind five monumental pieces of stone, three vases and two candlesticks; under an edifice of gold, a baldachin or a tabernacle which frames it on all sides; four characters are inscribed upon a vertical column.

Here writing possesses this mystery: it speaks. No moment marks its duration, no position. It is the commencement of an ageless sign. No mouth offers it. It exists; and the worshiper, face to face with it, ponders the written name. Solemnly enunciated in the gloom of the shadowy gold of the baldachin, the sign, between the two columns which are covered with the mystic windings of the dragon, symbolizes its own silence. The immense red hall seems to be the very color of obscurity, the pillars are hidden under a scarlet lacquer. Alone in the middle of the temple, before the sacred word, two columns of white granite seem its witness; the very soul, religious and abstract, of the place.

THE BANYAN

The banyan toils.

This giant does not, like his brother in India, endeavor to seize upon the earth again with his hands; but, raising himself with one turn of the shoulder, he lifts his roots to heaven like accumulated chains. Hardly has the trunk lifted itself several feet above the soil than it stretches its limbs laboriously, each like an arm which tugs away at a bundle of cords it has grasped. With a slow lengthening out, the hauling monster strains himself and labors in all the attitudes of effort so hard that the rude bark splits and the muscles stand out from the skin. There is the straight thrust, the flexing and the support, the twist of loin and shoulder, the slackening of haunches, the play of fulcrum and jack, the straightening up or reaching down of arms which seem to put the body out of joint. It is a knot of pythons, it is a hydra stubbornly tearing itself away from the tenacious earth. You might say that the banyan lifts a burden from the depths and upholds it with its straining limbs.

Honored by the humble settlement, at the gate of the village he is a patriarch clothed in shadowy foliage. At his feet is installed a furnace for offerings; and, in his very heart, under the spreading of his branches, is an altar with a stone doll. Witness of all that passes, possessor of the earth encompassed by multitudinous roots, here the ancient lives; and, whether alone with the children or at the hour when all the village reassembles under the twisted projections of his boughs (as the rosy rays of the moon, passing across the openings of his canopy, illumine the cabal with an outline of gold), the colossal tree, wherever his shadow turns, perseveres in imperceptible effort, adding the passing moment to his accumulated centuries.

Somewhere in mythology are honored the heroes who have distributed water to a country, and, striking a great rock, have delivered the obstructed mouth of a fountain. I see standing in the banyan a Hercules of the vegetable world, a monument of majestic labor. Would it not seem to be by his labors (this monster in chains, who vanquishes the avaricious resistance of the earth) that the springs gush forth and overflow, that grass grows afar off, and water is held at its level in the rice-fields.

He toils.

TOWARD THE MOUNTAIN

Coming out barefoot on the verandah, I look toward the left. On the brow of the mountain, among the torn clouds, a touch of phosphorus indicates the dawn. A movement of lamps in the house, a breakfast while still sleepy and benumbed; and then, with packages stowed away, we start. By the rugged coast we drop down to the neighboring city.

It is the vague hour when cities awaken. Already the open-air cooks blow fires under their stoves. Already in the depths of certain booths a vacillating light illumines nude bodies. In spite of spiked boards that have been placed flat against openings or hung over cornices,--huddled in corners in every free space, men stretch and sleep. Half awake, one scratches his side and stares at us out of the corner of his eyes with an air of delicious comfort. Another sleeps so heavily that you would think he was stuck to the stones. An old man, who has the appearance of being clothed in the scum that forms on stagnant waters, combs his mangy skull with his two hands. And finally, I must not forget that beggar with the head of a cannibal--his wildly disheveled hair bristling like a black bush--who, with one gaunt knee extended, lies flat under the first rays of morning.

Nothing could be stranger than a town at the hour when it sleeps. These streets seem like avenues in a necropolis. These houses exude sleep. And all of them, because of their closed doors, seem to me solemn and monumental. Every one, in the sleep wherein he is buried, suffers that singular change which comes over the faces of the dead. Like a little child with unfocused eyes, who frets and kneads the breast of his nurse with a feeble hand, the man who sleeps, with a great sigh, presses his face to the deep earth. Everything is silent because it is the hour when the earth gives to drink, and no one of her children turns in vain to her liberal breast. The poor and the rich, the young and the old, the just and the unjust, the judge with the prisoner, and man like the animals, all of them drink together like foster-brothers! All is mystery because this is the hour when Man communicates with his mother. The sleeper sleeps and cannot be awakened. He holds the breast and will not let it go. This draught still flows for him.

The street exudes odors of filth and hair.

Now the houses become fewer. We pass groups of banyans; and, in the pond that they shade, a great buffalo, of which we can only see the back and the moon-curved horns, stares at us with eyes of heavy stupor. We pass lines of women going to the fields. When one laughs her mirth spreads and grows feebler on the four faces that follow, and is effaced on the fifth. At the hour when the first ray of the sun traverses the virginal air, we gain the vast and empty plain; and, leaving behind us the tortuous road, we take our way toward the mountain across the fields of rice, tobacco, beans, pumpkins, cucumbers, and sugar-cane.

THE GREAT SEA

Climbing one day, I reach the plateau, and, in its basin of mountains where black islands emerge, I view afar off the great sea. Certainly, by a perilous path, it would be possible for me to gain the shore; but whether I follow its outline or whether I choose to take a boat, the surface remains impenetrable to my gaze. Well, then, I shall play on the flute, I shall beat the tom-tom; and the boat-woman, standing on one leg like a stork while with the other knee she supports her nursing baby as she conducts her sampan across the flat waters, will believe that the gods behind the drawn curtains of the clouds are enjoying themselves in the courts of their temple.

Or, unlacing my shoe, I shall throw it across the lake. Where it falls the passer-by will prostrate himself; and, having picked it up with superstitious awe, he will honor it with four sticks of incense. Or, curving my hands about my mouth, I shall cry out names. The words will die first, then the sound; and the tone alone, reaching the ears of some one, will make him turn from side to side, like a man who hears himself called in a dream and makes an effort to break his bonds.

THE TEMPLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS