Part 4
I have devoted more than one day simply to the discovery of it, ensconced upon its steep cliff of black rock, and it is not till late afternoon that I know myself to be upon the right path. From the giddy height where I climb, the wide rice-fields seem designed like a chart. The brink along which I move is so narrow that whenever I lift my right foot it is poised over the yellow expanse of the sown village fields spread out like a carpet below.
Silence. By an ancient staircase covered with a hoary lichen I descend in the pungent shade of the bay-trees, and, as the footpath at this turning is suddenly barred by a wall, I arrive at a closed door. I listen. No word, no voice, no drum! In vain I shake the wooden handle of the door, and beat upon it rudely with both hands.
Not even a bird cries as I scale the wall.
This place is inhabited after all; and while, sitting upon the balustrade where domestic linen is drying, I sink my teeth and fingers into the thick rind of a haddock stolen from the offerings, the old monk inside prepares me a cup of tea. Neither the inscription above the door nor the dilapidated idols who are honored with a thin spire of incense in the depths of this humble cave seem to me to constitute the religion of the place, any more than the acid fruit that I munch; but here--on this low platform, which incloses a piece of muslin,--this circular straw mat where the _bhiku_ will come soon to squat for meditation or sleep--is everything.
Let me compare this vast countryside, which opens out before me as far as the double wall of mountains and clouds, to a flower of which this seat is the mystic heart. Is it not the geometric center where the scene, united into an harmonious whole, virtually takes on existence and a consciousness of itself; and where, to the studious contemplation of the occupant, all lines converge?
The sun sets. I clamber up the steps of velvet whiteness where open pine-cones are strewn like roses.
OCTOBER
In vain I see the trees still green.
Whether a funereal haze enshroud it, or whether an enduring serenity of sky efface it, the year is not one day less near the fatal solstice. The sun does not deceive me, nor the widespread opulence of the country. There is a calm inexpressibly placid, a repose from which there is no awakening. The cricket has scarcely commenced his cry when he stills it, for fear of being an annoyance in the midst of plenty, since it is only dearth that gives him the right to speak. And it seems as if one were cautioned only with bare feet to penetrate into the fastnesses of these golden fields. No! The sky behind me does not radiate the same light over the wide harvest; and, as the road leads me by the stacks, whether I turn the corner of a pond here or whether I discover a village by going farther from the sun, I turn my face toward that broad pale moon which I have seen all day.
It was at the moment of emerging from the dark olives, when I saw the radiant plain open out before me straight to the barriers of the mountain, that an interpretation was communicated to me. Oh last fruits of a condemned season! In the achievement of the day is the supreme maturity of the irretrievable year. _It is finished._
The impatient hands of winter do not strip the earth barbarously. No winds tear at her; no frost splinters, no waters drown her. But more tenderly than May--or when insatiable June clings to the source of life, possessing the noon hour--the sky smiles at the earth with ineffable love. Like a heart which yields to continual importuning, is this consent; the grain separates from the ear, the fruit falls from the tree, the earth little by little abandons herself to the invincible solicitor of all. Death loosens a hand too full. The word that she hears now is holier than that of her wedding day, deeper, more tender and more glorious. _It is finished._
The bird sleeps, the tree falls asleep in the shade which encompasses it, the sun at the level of the earth covers it with a long ray. The day is done, the year is consummated. To the celestial interrogation is returned this amorous response. _It is finished._
NOVEMBER
The sun sets on a day of peace and labor, yet men, women, and children, their disheveled hair full of dust and wisps of straw, their faces and legs stained with earth, work on. Here they cut rice, here they gather up the sheaves; and, as on wall-paper the same scene is repeated indefinitely, so on every side we see great wooden vats with men who, face to face, beat ears of corn against the sides; and already the plow commences to turn the clay again. All about is the odor of grain, the perfume of the harvest. At the end of the plain where the men are working is a wide river; and there, in the middle of the fields, an arch of triumph colored by the setting of the crimson sun completes the peaceable picture. A man who passes near me holds in his hand a flame-colored chicken, another carries at the ends of his bamboo a big tin teapot, hanging in front of him,--and behind him a package made of some green relishes, a bit of meat, a bundle of those slips of silver paper that are burned for the dead, and a fish hung beneath by a straw. His blue blouse, his violet trousers, gleam against the lacquered gold of the stubble.
--Let no one mock my idle hands! The hurricane itself, and the weight of the sea that it hurls, cannot shake the heavy stone; but wood will float on the water, leaves yield to the air; I, still more trifling, fix my feet nowhere upon the earth, and the departing light draws me with it. By the dark roads of the villages, among pines and tombs, and along the far-stretched fields, I am the setting sun. Neither the happy plain nor the harmony of these mountains, nor the alluring color of the verdure on the ruddy harvest, can satisfy the eye which demands light itself. Below in that square moat, enclosed by the mountain with a rude wall, the air and the water burn with a mysterious fire. I see a gold so beautiful that all nature seems to me a dead mass; in comparison with that light the clarity that she can diffuse is darkest night. Desirable elixir, by what mystic route will I be led to participate in thy avaricious waters?
This evening the sun leaves me near a great orange tree that the family which it nourishes have begun to strip. A ladder is leaning against the tree. I hear speech in the foliage. In the lingering neutral light of the hour I see the golden fruit gleam through the somber leaves. Coming nearer I see each twig etched clearly against the green of the evening. I regard the little red oranges, I breathe their bitter, strong aroma. Oh marvelous harvest, promised to One alone! Fruit shown to that immortal part of us which triumphs!
Before I reach the pines night falls and the cold moon lights me. This seems to me to be the difference: that the sun looks at us, but we look at the moon. Her face is turned away, and like a fire which lights up the bottom of the sea she makes every shadow become visible.... In the heart of this ancient tomb, in the thick grass of this ruined temple, under the form of fair ladies or wise old men, possibly I shall meet a company of foxes! They will offer me verses and riddles, they will make me drink their wine, and my way will be forgotten. These civil hosts wish to give me entertainment. They mount standing, one on top of another--and then, as the spell breaks, I find myself in the straight white footpath that leads me toward my home. But already in the depths of the valley I see a human fire burning.
PAINTING
Let some one fasten this piece of silk by the four corners for me, and I shall not put the sky upon it. The sea and its shores, the forest and the mountains, do not tempt my art. But from the top to the bottom and from one side to the other, as between new horizons, with an artless hand I shall paint the Earth. The limits of communities, the divisions of fields, will be exactly outlined,--those that are already plowed, those where the battalions of sheaves still stand. I shall not fail to count each tree. The smallest house will be represented with an ingenuous industry. Looking closely, you may distinguish the people; he who crosses an arched bridge of stone, parasol in hand; he who washes buckets at a pond; the litter traveling on the shoulders of two porters, and the patient laborer who plows a new furrow the length of the old. A long road bordered with a double row of skiffs crosses the picture from one corner to the other, and in one of the circular moats can be seen, in a scrap of azure for water, three quarters of a slightly yellow moon.
THE SOLITARY
Have I ever lived elsewhere than in this circular gorge hollowed in the heart of the rock? Doubtless at three o’clock a raven will not fail to bring me the bread I need, unless the perpetual sound of the falling water can keep me fat! A hundred feet above me, as if it gushed with violence out of the radiant heaven itself, between the bamboos that obstruct it, leaping the sudden verge, the torrent is engulfed and plunges in a vertical column, partly dark and partly luminous,--striking the floor of the cavern with re-echoing thunders.
No human eye could discover where I am. In shadows that only the noonday dissipates, the strand of this little lake, shaking with the unceasing plunge of the cascade, is my habitation. Above, where an inexhaustible torrent falls from the gorge, only this handful of sparkling milk-white water reaches me directly from the generous sky. The stream escapes by this turning; and sometimes, mingled with the cries of the birds in the forest and with this soft gushing near me, I hear the voluble noise of falling waters behind me descending toward the earth.
DECEMBER
Sweeping the country and the leafy valley, thy hand, reaching these purple and tan-colored lands that thine eyes discover below thee, is arrested by them on this rich brocade. All is quiet and muffled; no green shocks, nothing new and young jars on the composure of the scene, on the harmony of these full and hollow tones. A somber cloud occupies the whole sky, heaping with fog the cleft of the mountain. One might say that it was dovetailed into the horizon. With thy hand, December, caress these large adornments, tufts of black pine like brooches against the hyacinth of the plain; verify with thy fingers these details sunk in the enmeshing fog of this winter day: a row of trees, a village. Truly the hour is arrested. Like an empty theater, abandoned to melancholy, the sealed-up countryside seems to listen for a voice so shrill that I cannot hear it.
These afternoons in December are sweet. Nothing speaks as yet of the tormenting future, and the past is not yet so dead that it has no survivals. Of all the grass and of such a great harvest nothing remains but strewn straw and dry brush. Cold water softens the ploughed earth. All is finished. This is the pause, the suspension, between one year and the next. Thought, delivered from her labor, gives herself up to recollection with a sweet taciturnity, and, meditating on new enterprises, like the earth she tastes her sabbath.
TEMPEST
In the morning, leaving a shore the color of roses and of honey, our ship entered upon the high sea through streamers of low and sluggish fog. When, having wakened from this somber dream, I seek the sun, I see that it is setting behind us; but before us, bounding the black, dead spaces of the sea, one long mountain, like an embankment of snow, bars the north from one end of the sky to the other. This Alp lacks nothing, neither coldness nor rigidity. Alone in the midst of the solitude, like a combatant who advances in an enormous arena, our ship moves toward the white obstacle which rises cleaving the melancholy waters; and all at once a cloud hides the sky from us like the hood of a wagon drawn over it. In the cleft of daylight that it leaves on the horizon behind us, I look for the reappearance of the sun. The islands shine like a lighted lamp, and three junks stand out on the crest of the sea.
We are rushing now across a stretch of water that is roughened by the clouds. The surface heaves; and, as the motion of the abyss affects our deck, the prow lifts and plunges, solemnly as if saluting, or like a cock who measures his adversary. It is night. From the north blows a harsh wind full of horror. On one side a ruddy moon, moving among disordered clouds, strikes through them with a lens-shaped edge; on the other the beacon-lamp of rippled red glass is hoisted to our foresail. Now all is calm again. The sheaf of water gushing always evenly before us, and shot with a mysterious fire, streams away from our prow like a body made of tears.
THE PIG
I shall paint here the pig’s portrait. He is a solid beast, made all in one piece, without joints and without a neck; and he sinks in front like a sack, jolting along on four squat hams. He is a trumpet on the march, ever seeking; and to every odor that he scents he applies his pump-like body. He sucks it in. When he has found the necessary hole, he wallows enormously. This is not the wriggling of a duck who enters the water. It is not the sociable happiness of the dog. It is a deep, solitary, conscientious, integral enjoyment. He sniffs, he sips, he tastes, and you cannot say whether he eats or drinks. Perfectly round, with a little quiver, he advances and buries himself in the unctuous center of the fresh filth. He grunts, he sports in the recesses of his tripery. He winks an eye. Consummate amateur, although his ever-active smelling apparatus lets nothing escape, his tastes do not run to the transient perfumes of flowers or of frivolous fruits. In everything he searches for nourishment. He loves it rich and strong and ripe, and his instinct attaches him to these two fundamental things, earth and ordure.
Glutton, wanton, though I present you with this model, admit this--that something is lacking to your satisfaction. The body is not sufficient to itself; but the doctrine that you teach us is not in vain. “Do not apply the eye alone to truth, but all that is thyself, without reserve.” Happiness is our duty and our inheritance, a certain perfect possession is intended.
But like the sow which furnished the oracles to Æneas, the meeting with one always seems to me an augury, a social symbol. Her flank is more vague than hills seen through the rain, and when she litters, giving drink to a battalion of young boars who march between her legs, she seems to me the very image of those mountains which suckle the clusters of villages attached to their torrents, no less massive and no less misshapen.
I must not omit to say that the blood of the pig serves to fix gold.
THE SOURCE
Let other rivers carry toward the sea oak branches and the red infusion of rusty earth, roses and the bark of sycamores, strewn straw or slabs of ice; let the Seine in the damp mornings of December, when half-past eight sounds from the steeples of the city, unmoor under the rigid derricks barges of manure and lighters full of casks; let the River Haha, at the smoking crest of its rapids, erect all at once, like the rude semblance of a pike, the trunk of a hundred-foot pine tree; and let the Equatorial rivers carry in their turbid flow a confused world of trees and plants; yet, flat on my face, held fast against the current, the width of this one river is not equal to my arms, nor its depth sufficient to engulf me.
The promises of the Occident are not lies! Learn this: this gold does not vainly appeal to our blindness, it is not devoid of delights. I have found that it is insufficient to see, inexpedient to remain standing; upon analysis my enjoyment is in that of which I can take possession; for, descending the steep bank with the feet of astonishment, I have discovered the source. The riches of the West are not forbidden me. Over the curve of the earth, straight toward me, they are rolling.
Not the silk molded by a hand or a bare foot, not the deep wool of the carpet used for the consecration of a king, can be compared to the resistance of this liquid depth where my own weight supports me. Neither the name of milk nor the color of the rose can be compared to this marvel whose descent I receive upon me. Truly I drink, truly I am plunged in wine! Let the ports open to receive the cargoes of wood and grain that come to them from the high countries; let the fishers tend their lines to catch wreckage and fish; let the searchers for gold filter the water and sift the sand; the river does not carry less riches to me. Do not say that I see, because the eye does not suffice for this, which demands a more subtle sense. To enjoy is to understand, and to understand is to evaluate.
At the hour when the holy light evokes to complete response the shadow that she dissipates, the surface of these waters opens a flowerless garden to my motionless navigation. Between these deep violet ripples the water is painted like the reflection of tapers, like amber, like palest green, like the color of gold. But silence! What I have discovered is mine, and now, as the water darkens, I will possess the night alone with all its visible and invisible stars.
DOORS
Every solid door opens upon less than is shut out by its particular panels. Many, through progress in the occult, have gained Yamen, the solitary state, and the court which a great silence fills; but if any one, after attaining this degree, at the moment when his hand is poised for a blow on the drum offered to visitors, hears the sound of his name penetrating the distance like a muffled cry (because the spouse or the sons of the dead are shouting loudly into his left ear), and if he vanquishes his fatal languor long enough to draw away one or two steps from the doors just barely opening to his desire,--his soul will regain its body. But no melody of a name can rescue those who have taken the irretrievable step over the secret sill. Without doubt I am in such a realm, on the shallow stones of this somber pond which surrounds me; as, standing within its ornate frame, I taste forgetfulness and the secret of this taciturn garden.
An ancient memory has not more windings or more secret passages than the road which has led me here, through a succession of courts, grottoes, and open corridors. The art of this restricted place is to hide its limits from me by bewildering me. Its undulant walls, which mount and descend, divide it into separate sections; and, while the tops of trees and the roofs of houses, showing through, seem to invite the guest to search out their secrets; these barriers, multiplying surprises and deceits in his path, lead him further away. Except for a wise dwarf with a skull like the belly of a gourd, or a pair of young storks surmounting its ornamental apex, the chalice of the roof shadows a hall not so deserted but that a half-consumed stick of incense still smokes there, and a forgotten flower fades. The princess and her old counselor have only just arisen from yonder seat and the greenish air is still full of the rustle of illustrious silk.
Fabulous indeed is my habitation! I see, in these walls where the pierced copings seem to melt away, banks of clouds; and these fantastic windows are as masses of leaves confusedly seen through the rifts. The wind, leaving on each side curving streamers, gashes irregular breaches in the fog. Let me not gather the flower of the afternoon from any other garden than this, which I enter by a door in the outline of a vase, of a leaf, of a dragon’s smoking jaws, of the setting sun when its disk reaches the sea-line, or of the rising moon!
THE RIVER
From the vast and yellow river my eyes return to our leadsman crouching at the side of the boat. Turning the line in his fist with a regular motion, he sends the lead in full flight across the muddy waters.
As the elements of a parallelogram unite, so water expresses the power of a country reduced to geometrical lines. Each drop is a fugitive calculation, a visible measurement always crossing the circumferential slope; and, having found the lowest point of a given area, it joins a current which flows with more impetus toward the deeper center of a still larger circle. This stream is immense in its force and extent. It is the outlet of a world. It is slow-moving Asia pouring forth. Powerful as the sea, this river has a destination and a source. The current is without branches or tributaries. We shall have mounted all these days in vain! We shall never reach the fork! Always before us, cleaving the countryside with irresistible power and volume, the river evenly divides the horizon of the West.
All water seems attractive to us, but certainly, more than the blue and virgin sea, this appeals to that in us which is between the flesh and the soul,--our human current charged with virtue and with spirit, the deep and burning blood. Here is one of the great laboring veins of the world, one of the arteries for the distribution of life. Beneath me I feel moving the protoplasm which strives and destroys, which fills and fashions us. And, while we remount this enormous river which melts about us into the gray sky and swallows up our route, it is the entire earth which we receive, the Earth of the earth: Asia, mother of all men, central, solid, primordial. Oh abundant bosom! Surely I see it, and it is vainly that the grass everywhere disguises it; I have penetrated this mystery. As water with a purple stain might attest some undeniable wound, so the earth has impregnated this river with her substance. It is solely of gold.
The sky is lowering. The clouds move slowly toward the north. To right and left I see a somber Mesopotamia. Here are neither villages nor cultivation; only here and there, between the stripped trees, four or five primitive huts, some fishing-tackle on the bank, and a ruined boat which moves--a miserable vessel hoisting a rag for sail! Extermination has passed over this country, and the river which carries opulent life and nourishment waters a region no less deserted than where the first waters issued from Paradise, when Man, hollowing the horn of an ox, delivered the first rude, harsh cry in the echoless wastes.
THE RAIN
By the two windows before me, the two at my left, and the two at my right, I see and hear the rain falling in torrents on every side. I think it is a quarter of an hour past noon. Luminous water is all about me. I dip my pen in the ink; and, rejoicing like an insect in the center of a bubble in the security of my watery imprisonment, I write this poem.
It is not a drizzle that falls; it is not a languishing and doubtful rain. The rain grips the earth and beats upon it in serried sullenness, with a heavy, powerful assault. How cool it is, oh frogs, to forget the pond in the thickness of the damp grass! No need to fear that the rain is ceasing. It is copious, it is satisfying. He is thirsty indeed, my brothers, for whom this marvelous beaker does not suffice. The earth has disappeared, the house bathes, the submerged trees stream; the very river, which terminates my horizon like the sea, seems drowned. Time has no duration, and, straining my ears not only for the unlocking of each new hour, I meditate the psalm of the rain, so endless and so neutral in tone. But toward the end of the day the rain ceases, and, while the accumulated clouds prepare for a heavier assault,--as if Iris from the summit of the sky were about to flash straight into the heart of the conflict,--a black spider sways head downward and hung by his rear in the middle of this window which I have opened on the leafage and the walnut-stained North. It is no longer clear. I must strike a light. Meanwhile I shall make to tempests a libation of this drop of ink.
NIGHT ON THE VERANDAH