Part 5

Certain redskins believe that the souls of still-born children live in the shells of winkles. I am listening tonight to the uninterrupted chorus of tree-frogs, like childish elocution, like a plaintive recitation of little girls, like an ebullition of vowels.

I have long studied the ways of the stars. Some move singly, others mount in squadrons. I have recognized the “Doors” and the “Three Ways.” As the clearest space gains the zenith, Jupiter with pure greenish brilliance moves forth like a golden calf. The position of the stars is not left to chance. The interplay of their distances gives me the proportions of the void. Their swing participates in our equilibrium, vital rather than mechanical. I feel their oscillations beneath my feet.

Arriving at the last of these ten windows, the mystic secret consists in surprising at the opposite window, across the shadowy, uninhabited room, another fragment of the heavenly chart.

No intrusion will derange your dreams, and no celestial glances into your chamber will disquiet your repose, if before going to bed you are careful to arrange this great mirror before the night. Since the earth presents such a wide sea to the stars, it must also render itself liable to their influence and spread its deep ocean beneath them like a photographic developing bath.

The night is so calm that it seems to me embalmed.

THE SPLENDOR OF THE MOON

By this key which rids me of the world, opening to my blindness a muffled door; by this irresistible drifting away, by the mysterious sweetness which animates me and the deep response of my own heart to a soft explosion of mysterious sounds, I realize that I am asleep, and I awaken.

I had left my four windows open to the dark and somber night; and now, going out on the verandah, I see all the depth of space filled with thy light, oh sun of dreams! Far from disturbing sleep, this fire rising from the midst of darkness creates it, overpowering my senses more profoundly. But not in vain, like a priest awakened for his midnight mass, have I come from my bed to survey this mysterious mirror. The light of the sun is a force of life and of creation, and our vision partakes of its energy; but the splendor of the moon is like thought meditating upon itself. I contemplate her alone, lost to sound and heat; and all creation paints itself black beneath her brilliant expanse.

What solemn orgies! Long before the morning, I contemplate the image of the world. And already yonder great tree has flowered. Straight and alone, like an immense white lilac; bride of the night, it trembles all dripping with light. Oh star of after-midnight! Not the pole-star at the dizzy zenith, nor the red fire of the Bull, nor that planet which is revealed by a moving leaf, clear topaz in the heart of yonder dark tree,--none of these do I choose as queen, but high above them that farthest star lost in infinite light, that my eye acclaims in accord with my heart, and recognizes only to see it disappear.

DREAMS

At night, on your way to listen to music, take care to have a lantern for your return! Shod in white, be careful not to lose sight of either of your shoes; for fear that, having once confided the sole of your foot to an invisible path through the fog, an unknown road does not lead you hopelessly astray and the dawn find you entangled in the top of a flagstaff or clinging to the corner of a temple wall as a bat does upon the head of a chimera.

Seeing this stretch of white wall lit by the intense fire of the moon, the priest did not hesitate, by means of his rudder, to drive his little boat against it; and in the morning a bare, bright sea betrayed nowhere any trace of his oar.

The fisher, having digested this long day of silence and melancholy--the sky, the fields, three trees, and the water--has not prolonged expectation so vainly that nothing is taken by his bait. To his very marrow he feels (with the clutch of his fish-hook) the swift tension of his rigid line, which, cutting the glassy surface, draws him toward black depths. A leaf, twirling over, does not ripple the transparence of the pool.

Who knows where you would not be liable some day to discover the mark of your hand and the seal of your thumb, if each night before sleeping you would take care to smear your fingers with a thick black ink?

Moored to the outer opening of my chimney, a canoe, hanging almost vertical, awaits me. Having finished my work, I am invited to take tea in one of those islands which cross the sky in the direction East Southwest.

With its clustered buildings and the warm tones of its marble walls, the locality resembles a city in Africa or in Italy. The system of drainage is perfect, and on the terrace where we are seated one enjoys pure air and a most extended view. Unfinished buildings, ruined wharves, the foundations of crumbling bridges, surround this cyclad on all sides.

Since the jetty of yellow mud where we live has been embraced by this pearly expanse,--from an inundation whose progress I survey each evening from the ramparts,--all illusion and enchantment mount up to me. It is in vain that the barges come unceasingly from the other side of the lagoon, carrying us earth to strengthen our crumbling embankments. What faith I had in these green fields, road-divided, to which the farmer would not hesitate to confide his seeds and his labor! And then one day, on ascending the wall, I saw them replaced by these waters the color of the dawn. Only a village emerges here and there, a tree drowned to the branches; and, at this place where a yellow gang was digging, I see boats as close together as eyelashes. But also I read menaces in this too-beautiful evening! No stronger than an ancient precept against voluptuousness is this ruined wall, where the miserable soldiers who guard the gates announce the night by blasts from trumpets four feet long. It cannot defend our black factories and warehouses, filled with hides and tallow, against the night and against the irresistible spread of these rose-colored and azure waters; for an oncoming wave will sweep me from my feet and carry me away, lifting me up beneath the arms.

And again I see myself at the highest fork of an old tree in the wind, a child balanced among the apples. From there, like a god on his pinnacle, spectator of the theater of the world, I study with deep consideration the relief and conformation of the earth, its disposition of slopes and planes. With the piercing eye of a crow I peer up and down the country spread out under my perch. I follow this road which, appearing twice on the brow of little hills, finally loses itself in the forest. I miss nothing: the direction of smoke, the qualities of shadow and of light, the progress of the farmwork, a wagon which lurches along the road, the shots of the hunters. No need of a paper wherein I could only read the past! I have only to climb to this branch, and, across the wall, all the present is before me. The moon rises. I turn my face toward her, bathed with light in this house of fruits. I remain motionless, and from time to time an apple from the tree falls like a ripe and heavy thought.

HEAT

Today is more arduous than the Inferno. Out of doors is an overpowering sun. A blinding splendor devours all the shade, a splendor so steady that it seems solid. I see in everything around me less of immobility than of stupor, an arrested effort. For the earth in these four moons has completed her production. It is time that her spouse kill her, and, unveiling the fire with which he burns, condemn her with an inexorable kiss.

As for me, what shall I say? Ah, if this flaming heat is frightful to my frailty, if my eye turns away, if my body sweats, if I sink on my knees, I will blame this inert flesh; but the virile spirit will soar free in an heroic transport! I feel it, my soul hesitates, but nothing less than the supreme can satisfy this exquisite and terrible jealousy. Let others hide under the earth, obstructing with care the least fissure in their buildings; but a sublime heart, pressed against the sharpness of love, will embrace fire and torture. Sun, redouble thy flames! It is not enough to burn,--consume! My sorrow would be not to suffer enough. May nothing impure escape from the furnace, no blindness from the torture of the light!

THE VISION OF A CITY

At the hour when, urged by an exalted foreboding, such a man as I, wifeless and childless, reaches the level of the setting sun; as he attains the mountain’s crest high above the earth and its people, he sees the mysterious representation of a splendid city hanging enormous in the sky. It is a city of temples.

In modern cities we see the streets and the different quarters crowd and center about various markets and exchanges, schools and municipal buildings, whose high pinnacles and distributed masses stand out above the uniform roofs; but here the poised image of an eternal city, built by the evening in the form of a triple mountain, discloses not a single earthly detail, and shows nothing in the infinite ramification of its construction and the type of its architecture which is not appropriate to the sublime service it renders, although accomplished without preparation or practise.

And as the citizen of a kingdom, whose road leads to the capital, seeks to understand the plan of the immense place; so the contemplative, gazing at Jerusalem, fearing to enter it with soiled sandals, studies the interpretation of its laws, and the conditions of a sojourn there. Not a nave, not a single plan of cupola or portico, but responds to the observances of a cult; not a movement or a detail of stairs and terraces is disregarded in the development of ceremony. The moats of towers, the superimposition of walls, the basilicas, circuses, and reservoirs,--and even the tree-tops in the square gardens,--are molded of the same snow; and the violet tinge of their shadows is perhaps only such a color of mourning as irreparable distance adds.

Thus one evening a solitary city appeared for an instant before me.

DESCENDING THE RIVER

Well, let these men continue to sleep!

May the boat not yet arrive at its port! Thus shall my misery be made to hear my last word, or I at least have said it.

Emerging from a night’s sleep, I am awakened in flames.

So much beauty compels my laughter. What splendor, what brilliance! What a wealth of inextinguishable color! It is Aurora. Oh God, how much refreshment this blue has for me! How tender the green is, how cool; and, looking toward the furthest heaven, what peace to see it still so dark that the stars twinkle there!

But how well you know, my friend, where to turn and what awaits you, if, on lifting your eyes, you need not blush to behold this heavenly brightness! Oh may it indeed be this color which I am given to contemplate! Not red, and not the color of the sun, it is the fusing of blood in gold. It is life consummated in victory. It is the perpetual renewal of youth in eternity.

The thought that this is only the day arising does not diminish my exaltation in the least; but the thing that embarrasses me like a lover, that makes me tremble through my whole body, is the intention hidden in such glory. It is my admission to it, it is my progress toward meeting with this joy.

Drink, oh my heart, of these inexhaustible delights!

What do you fear? Do you not see how the current, accelerating the movement of our boat, leads us on? Why doubt that we shall arrive, and that endless day will respond to the brightness of such a promise? I foresee that the sun will rise, and that I must prepare to sustain its power. Oh light, drown all transitory things in the depth of thy abyss!

Let noon come, and it will be vouch-safed me to meditate, Summer, upon thy reign, and to include the whole day in my perfected joy, as I sit amid the peace of all the earth in the harvest solitudes.

THE BELL

While the air is rejoicing in perfect stillness, at the hour when the sun is consummating the mystery of noon, then the great bell, with its sonorous and concave expanse swung to the point of melody by the blows of its cedarn hammer, rings with the rolling earth; and soon its sound, receding and advancing, has crossed mountain and plain until a wall which one can see on the far horizon, with a series of Cyclopean doors piercing it at symmetrical intervals, hems in the volume of its resounding thunder and forms the frontier of its clamor. In one corner of this enclosure a city is built. The rest of the place is occupied by fields, woods, and tombs; and here and there, under the shadow of sycamores, the vibrations of a bronze gong far within a pagoda deflect the echoes of the monster as they die away.

I have seen, near the observatory where Kangchi went to study the stars of old age, the pavilion where the bell resides under the guard of an old _bonze_, honored by offerings and inscriptions. The outstretched arms of an average man are the measure of its width. I knock with a finger upon its surface, which sings through a six-inch thickness at the least shock. For a long time I lend an ear. And I recall the history of the molder.

That cord of silk or catgut should resound under the curve of the bow, that wood, having been instructed by the winds, should lend itself to music,--in these phenomena the artisan found nothing singular; but to attack the very element, to extort the musical scale from primitive soil, seemed to him the means of properly making Man resonant and awakening his clay. So his art was the casting of bells.

His first bell was carried up to heaven in a storm. The second, when they had loaded it on a boat, fell into the deep and muddy waters of the Kiang. The man resolved to make a third before he died, and this time he wished to gather into one deep vessel the soul and the whole voice of the nourishing and productive earth, and pack into one thunderous vibration the fulness of all sound. This was the plan that he conceived, and the day that he commenced his enterprise, a daughter was born to him.

Fifteen years he labored at this work. But it was in vain that, having conceived the idea of his bell, he planned with a subtle art the dimensions, curves, and caliber; or that, having extracted from the most secret metals whatever listens and trembles, he made sheets so sensitive that they would vibrate at the mere approach of a hand; or that, from a sonorous instrument placed among them, he deeply studied properties and harmonies. When a pure and faultless bell had issued from the mold of sand, the copper side would never respond the expected answer to his interrogation; or, if the double beat balanced itself in even intervals, it was his misery never to feel life in them,--that indefinable mellowness and moisture which is given to words formed in the human mouth.

Meanwhile the girl grew with her father’s despair; and, when she saw that the old man was consumed by his mania and no longer searched for new alloys, but threw into his crucibles blades of wheat and the sap of aloes, and milk and the blood from his own veins,--then a great pity was born in the heart of the maiden, for which women come to the bell today to venerate her image of painted wood. Having said her prayer to the subterranean god, she clothed herself in wedding garments; and, like a dedicated victim, having fastened a stalk of straw about her neck, she threw herself into the molten metal. So the bell was given a soul; and the resounding elementary forces gained this feminine, virginal grace, and the ineffable liquid note.

Then the old man, having kissed the still warm bronze, struck it powerfully with his mallet; and so lively was the invasion of joy at the perfection he heard, and the victory of its magnificence, that his heart languished within him; and, sinking upon his knees, he could not keep from dying.

Since then, and since the day when a city was born of its widespread summons, the metal has cracked and gives only a dying echo of its former self. But the wise, with a vigilant heart, still hear at the break of day, when a faint, cold wind comes from skies the color of apricots and of hop-flowers, the first bell--in the celestial spaces--and, at the somber set of sun, the second bell--in the depths of the immense and muddy Kiang.

THE TOMB

On the pediment of the funereal portal I read an order to alight. On my right are some broken statues in the reeds, and an inscription on a formidable pillar of black granite gives with wearisome detail the laws relating to sepulchers; half obliterated by moss a threat forbids the breaking of vases, loud cries, or the spoiling of ceremonial basins.

It is certainly later than two o’clock, because I see that the dim, round sun is already a third of the way down a dull and lurid sky. I can only mount straight onward, to survey the arrangement of the cemetery; and, preparing my heart, I start out on the road the funerals follow across this home of the dead, in itself lifeless. First come, one after another, two square mountains of brick. Their hollow centers open by four arches on the four points of the compass. The first of these halls is empty. In the second a giant tortoise of marble, so high that I can scarcely reach his mustached head with my hand, supports a panegyric column. “This is the porch and apprenticeship of the earth,” I thought. “Here Death halted between the double thresholds, and here the master of the world received supreme homage between the four horizons and the sky.”

But scarcely have I gone out by the Northern door (it is not vainly that I leap this rivulet!) than I see open out before me the country of the shades.

Forming an avenue of alternate couples, monstrous animals appear before me, facing each other, successively repeated kneeling and standing in pairs; rams, horses, unicorns, camels, elephants; until, at the turning where the last of the procession disappears, these enormous and ugly shapes loom out against the straggling grass. Further off are ranged civil and military mandarins. These stones are sent to ceremonial funerals in the place of animals and men; and, as the dead have crossed the threshold of life, it would not be suitable to give closer likenesses to such replicas.

Here, where this large cairn--hiding, they say, the treasures and bones of a very ancient dynasty--ceases to bar the passage, the way turns toward the East. I am walking now among soldiers and ministers. Some are intact and standing, others lie on their faces. One warrior without a head still clasps the hilt of a sword in his fist. By a triple-arched bridge the path crosses the second canal.

Now, by a series of stairs where the central hand-rail still shows the imperial dragon, I cross the ravaged site of terraces and courts. These are the walks of Memory, the fugitive traces of lives which, leaving the earth, serve only to enrich it by decay; the steps of sacrifices, the awful garden where what is destroyed attests its whilom existence in the presence of what still remains. In the center a throne supports, a baldachin still shelters, the inscription of a dynasty. All about, temples and guest-houses have become a confused rubbish among the briars.

And the tomb is before me.

Between massive projections of the square bastions which flank it, behind the deep-cut channel of the third stream, is a wall which assures us that the end of our journey must be here. A wall and nothing but a wall, a hundred feet high and two hundred feet wide. Eroded by the use of centuries, the inexorable barrier presents a blind face of masonry. A single round hole shows in the center of the base, the mouth of an oven or the oubliette of a dungeon. This wall forms the front of a sort of trapezoid formation, detached from the mountain which overhangs it. A low molding, ending beneath an overhanging cornice, stands out from the wall like a console. No corpse is so suspect as to require such a mass being placed upon him. This is the throne of Death itself, the regal exaltation of sepulture.

A straight alley, remounting the sloping plain, crosses a level plateau. At the end there is only the same mountain whose steep slope conceals in its depths the ancient Ming.

And I understand that this is the sepulcher of the Atheist. Time has scattered the vain temples and laid the idols in the dust, and only the arrangement of the place remains, with the idea it expressed. The pompous catafalques on the threshold have not been able to retain the dead. The cortège of his vanished glory cannot retard him. He crosses the three rivers, he traverses the manifold courts filled with incense; nor is the monument that has been prepared for him sufficient to hold him. He cleaves his way further, and enters into the very body and bones of primitive earth. It is merely an animal interment, the mixing of crude flesh with inert and compact clay. The king and peasant are forever consolidated into this death without a dream or an awakening.

But the shadow of evening spreads over this cruel place. Oh ruins, the tomb has survived you! And the brutal stolidity of this bulk is a perfect symbol of death itself.

As I return among the colossal statues of stone, I see in the dried grass the decaying corpse of a horse, which a dog is tearing. The beast looks at me as he licks the blood which trickles down his chops; then, applying his paws again to the red carcass, he tears off a long strip of flesh. The mangled remains are spread about.

THE MELANCHOLY WATER

There is an intelligence in joy, I admit it. There is a vision in laughter. But that you may comprehend, my friend, this medley of blessedness and bitterness which the act of creation includes, now that the melancholy season begins I shall explain to you the sadness of water.

The same tear falls from the sky that overflows from the eyelid. Do not think to accuse the cloud of your melancholy, nor this veil of vague showers. Shut your eyes; listen! The rain falls.

Nor does the monotony of this constant sound suffice to explain it.

It is a weary mourning whose cause is within itself. It is the self-absorption of love; it is the effort in labor. The heavens weep over the fruitful earth. Not only Autumn, and the future fall of fruit whose seed she nourishes, draws these tears from the wintry cloud. Sorrow is in the Summer; in the flower of life is the blossoming of death.

At the moment when the hour before noon is ended, as I descend into the valley filled with the murmur of various fountains, I pause enchanted by the gloom. How abundant are these waters! And if tears, like blood, have their perpetual source in us, how refreshing it is, listening to this liquid choir of voices, deep or shrill, to harmonize from them all the shades of grief! There is no passion but could borrow of your tears, oh fountain! And since the brightness of this single drop, falling from on high into the basin upon the image of the moon, satisfies my particular desire, not in vain shall I have learned to love your sanctuary through many dreamy afternoons, oh sorrowful valley!

I return to the plain. On the doorsill of his hut,--where, in the inner darkness, gleams a candle lit for some rustic fête,-a man sits, holding in his hand a dusty cymbal. It rains heavily. In the midst of this damp solitude, I hear only the cry of a goose.

THE NIGHT VOYAGE

I have forgotten why I undertook this voyage, and what matter I was to negotiate, as Confucius did when he went to carry his doctrine to the Prince of Ou. Seated all day in the depths of my varnished cabin, my urgency, on these calm waters, does not outrun the swanlike progress of the little boat. Only occasionally in the evening I come out to look at the aspect of the country.