Part 5

The great artery stretches on before us broad and straight,--a road three or four kilometres long, leading finally to another monumental gate which appears in the distance, surmounted by a dungeon with an absurd roof. This is an opening through a wall beyond which is the outside solitude. The low houses which line the street on both sides seem to be made of gold lace, from top to bottom the open woodwork of their façades glitters; they are finely carved at the top, all shining with gold, with gargoyles similar to our own, and rows of gilded dragons. Black stele covered with gold letters rise much higher than the houses, from which jut out black and gold lacquered platforms for the support of strange emblems with horns and claws and monsters' faces.

Through the clouds of dust, the gilding, the dragons, and the chimæras glisten in the dusty sunlight as far as one can see. Above it all triumphal arches of astonishing lightness mount heavenward across the avenue; they are airy things of carved wood, with supports like the masts of a ship, which repeat against the pale blue ether more strange hostile forms, horns, claws, and fantastic beasts.

On the broad highway where one treads as upon ashes, there is a dull rumbling of caravans and horses. The stupendous Mongolian camels, brown and woolly, attached to one another in long endless files, pass slowly and solemnly along, unceasingly like the waters of a river, raising as they walk the powdery bed which stifles the sounds of this entire city. They are going, who knows where, into the depths of the Thibetan or Mongolian deserts, carrying in the same indefatigable and unconscious way thousands of bales of merchandise; taking the place of canals and rivers which convey barges and junks over immense distances. So heavy is the dust raised by their feet that they can scarcely lift them; the legs of these innumerable camels in procession, as well as the lower parts of the houses, and the garments of the passers-by, are all vague and confused in outline, as though seen through the thick smoke of a forge, or through a shower of dark wool; but the backs of the great beasts with their shaggy coats, emerging from the soft clouds near the earth, are almost sharply defined, and the gold of the façades, tarnished below, shines brightly at the height of the extravagant cornices.

It seems like a phantasmagoric city with no real foundations, resting upon a cloud, a heavy cloud, whereon gigantic sheep, with necks enlarged by a thick brown fleece, move inoffensively.

Above the dust the sun shines clear and white, making resplendent the cold, penetrating light in which things stand out incisively. Objects that are high up above the ground stand out with absolute clearness. The smallest of small monsters on the top of the triumphal arches may be clearly seen, as well as the most delicate carving on the summits of the stele; one can even count the teeth, the forked tongues, the squinting eyes of the hundreds of gold chimæras which jut from the roofs.

Pekin, the city of carvings and gildings, the city of claws and horns, is still capable of creating illusions; on dry, sunny, windy days it recovers something of its splendor under the dust of the steppes, under the veil which then masks the shabbiness of its streets and the squalor of its crowds.

Yet all is old and worn in spite of the gilding which still remains bright. In this quarter there was continual fighting during the siege of the legations, the Boxers destroying the homes of those whom they suspected of sympathy for the barbarians.

The long avenue which we have been following for half an hour ends now at an arched bridge of white marble, still a superb object; here the houses come to an end, and on the opposite bank the gloomy steppes begin.

This was the Bridge of the Beggars,--dangerous inhabitants, who, before the capture of Pekin, ranged themselves on both sides of its long railing and extorted money from the passers-by; they formed a bold corporation with a king at its head, who often went armed. Their place is unoccupied to-day; the vagrants departed after the battles and massacres began.

Beyond this bridge a gray plain, empty and desolate, extends for two kilometres, as far as the Great Wall, far beyond where Pekin ends. The road, with its tide of caravans, goes straight on through this solitude to the outside gate. Why should this desert be enclosed by the city's walls? There is not a trace of previous constructions; it must always have been as it is. No one is in sight on it; a few stray dogs, a few rags, a few bones, and that is all.

For a long distance into this steppe there are sombre red walls at both right and left which seem to enclose great cedar woods. The enclosure at the right is that of the Temple of Agriculture; at the left is the Temple of Heaven, for which we are bound. We plunge into this gloomy region, leaving the dust and the crowds behind.

The enclosure around the Temple of Heaven has a circumference of more than six kilometres; it is one of the most extensive in the whole city, where everything is on an old-time scale of grandeur which overpowers us to-day. The gate which was formerly impassable will not close now, and we enter the wood of venerable trees--cedars, arbor-vitæ, and willows--through which long avenues have been cut. This spot, accustomed to silence and respect, is now profaned by barbarian cavalry. Several thousand Indians sent out to China by England are encamped there; their horses have trampled the grass; the turf and the moss are filled with rubbish and manure. From a marble terrace where incense to the gods was formerly burned, clouds of infected smoke were rising, the English having chosen this place for the burning of cattle that die of the plague, and for the manufacture of bone-black.

There are, as in all sacred woods, two enclosures. The secondary temples, scattered amongst the cedars, precede the great central temple.

Never having been here before, we are guided by our judgment toward something which must be it, higher than anything else, above the tops of the trees,--a distant rotunda with a roof of blue enamel, surmounted by a gold sphere which glistens in the sunshine.

The rotunda, when we finally reach it, proves to be the sanctuary itself. Its approaches are silent; there are no more horses or barbarian riders. It stands on a high esplanade of white marble reached by a series of steps and by an "imperial path," reserved for the Son of Heaven, who is not permitted to mount stairs. An "imperial path" is an inclined plane, usually an enormous monolith of marble placed at an easy angle, upon which the five-clawed dragon is sculptured in bas-relief; the scales of the great heraldic animal, its coils and its nails, serve to sustain the Emperor's steps and to prevent his feet, dressed in silk, from slipping on the strange path reserved for Him alone, and which no Chinese would dare to tread.

We mount irreverently by this "imperial path," scratching the fine white scales of the dragon with our coarse shoes.

From the top of the lonely terrace, melancholy and everlastingly white with the unchanging whiteness of marble, one sees above the trees of the wood, great Pekin in its dust, which the sun is beginning to gild as it gilds the tiny evening clouds.

The gate of the temple is open, and guarded by an Indian trooper with oblong sphynx-like eyes, as out of his element as we in this ultra-Chinese and sacred environment. He salutes us and permits us to enter.

The circular temple is bright with red and gold and has a roof of blue enamel; it is a new temple built to replace a very old one which was burned ten years ago. The altar is bare, it is bare everywhere; plunderers have passed over it, leaving nothing but the marble pavements, the beautiful lacquered ceilings, and the walls; the tall columns of red lacquer, arranged in the form of a circle, all taper uniformly and are decorated with garlands of gold flowers.

On the esplanade around it, weeds have pushed their way here and there between the carved stones of the pavement, attesting the extreme age of the marble in spite of its immaculate whiteness. It is a commanding place, erected at great expense for the contemplation of the sovereigns, and we linger, like the Sons of Heaven themselves, to gaze upon it.

In our immediate vicinity the tops of the arbor-vitæ and the cedars,--the great wood which envelops us in calm and silence,--come first. Then, toward the north is the endless but obscure city, which seems almost unreal; one divines rather than sees it, so hidden is it in the smoke or fog which forms a gauzy veil. It might be a mirage were it not for the monumental roofs of exaggerated proportions, whose tops of shining enamel emerge from the fog here and there, clear and real; these are palaces and pagodas. Beyond all this, very far away, is the crest of the mountains of Mongolia, which to-night have no base and seem to be cut out of blue and red paper high up in the air. Toward the west is the gray steppe through which we have come; the slow procession of caravans crossing it marks upon it as far as the eye can see an uninterrupted brown path; we realize that this endless procession goes on for hundreds of miles, and that on all the great roads of China, to its most distant frontiers, similar processions are moving with identical slowness.

It is the old unchanging method of communication between these men so different from ourselves,--men with perseverance and infinite patience, for whom the march of time, which unsteadies us, does not exist; it forms for them the arterial circulation of this boundless empire, where four or five hundred million brains--the reverse of our own and forever incomprehensible to us--live and speculate.

IV

IN THE IMPERIAL CITY

I

SATURDAY, October 20.

It snows. The sky is lowering and overcast, with no hope of clearing, as though there were no longer any sun. A furious north wind is blowing, and the black dust whirls and eddies, commingling with the snowflakes.

This morning, my first interview with our minister took place at the Spanish legation. His temperature has fallen, but he is still very weak, and must remain in bed for some days, so I am obliged to postpone until to-morrow or the day after the communications I have to make to him.

I take my last meal with the members of the French legation in the chancellor's house, where, in default of sumptuous quarters, they have offered me the most kindly hospitality. At half-past one the two little Chinese chariots arrive, lent me for the emigration of myself, my people, and my light luggage to the Yellow City.

The Chinese chariots are very small, very massive, very heavy, and entirely without springs; mine has something of the elegance of a hearse; the outside is covered with a slaty-gray silk, with a wide border of black velvet.

We are to journey toward the northwest, in the opposite direction from the Chinese City where we were yesterday, and from the Temple of Heaven. We have five or six kilometres to go almost at a walk, on account of the pitiable condition of the streets and bridges, where most of the paving stones are missing.

These Chinese chariots cannot be closed; they are like a simple sentry box mounted on wheels,--so to-day we are lashed by the wind, cut by the snow, blinded by the dust.

First come the ruins of the legation district, full of soldiers. Then more lonely, almost deserted and entirely Chinese ruins--one gray, dusty devastation, seen vaguely through clouds of black and clouds of white. At the gates and on the bridges are European or Japanese sentinels, for the whole city is under military rule. From time to time we meet soldiers and ambulances carrying the flag of the Red-Cross Society.

At last the first enclosure of the Yellow or Imperial City is announced by the interpreter of the French legation, who has kindly offered to be my guide, and to share my chariot with its funeral trappings. I try to look, but the wind burns my eyes.

We are passing with frightful jolts through great blood-colored ramparts, not by way of a gate, but through a breach made with a mine by Indian cavalrymen.

Pekin, on the farther side of this wall, is somewhat less injured. In some of the streets the houses have kept their outside covering of gilded woodwork and their rows of chimæras along the edges of the roofs; all this is crumbling and decayed, it is true, licked by the flames or riddled by grape-shot. An evil-looking rabble, dressed in sheepskins or blue cotton rags, still swarms in some of the houses.

Another rampart of the same blood red and a great gate ornamented with faience through which we must pass,--this time it is the real gate of the Imperial City, the gate of the region which no one was ever allowed to enter; it is to me as though it had been announced as the gate to mystery or to an enchanted land.

We enter, and my surprise is great; for it is not a city, but a wood,--a sombre wood, infested with crows which croak in the gray branches. The trees are the same as those at the Temple of Heaven,--cedars, arbor-vitæ, and willows,--old trees all of them, of twisted shapes, unknown in our country. Sleet and snow cling to their branches, and the inevitable dust in the narrow, windy paths engulfs us.

There are also wooded hills where kiosks of faience rise among the cedars; in spite of their height, it is plain that they are artificial. Obscured by the snow and dust, we can see here and there in the distant wood austere old palaces, with enamelled roofs, guarded by horrible marble monsters which crouch at the thresholds.

The whole place is of an incontestable beauty, while at the same time it is dismal, unfriendly, and disturbing under this sombre sky.

Now we approach some enormous object which we shall soon be alongside of. Is it a fortress, a prison, or something more lugubrious still? Double ramparts without end, always blood red, with gloomy dungeons and a moat thirty metres wide, full of water-lilies and dying roses. This is the Violet City, enclosed in the heart of the impenetrable Imperial City, and more impenetrable still. It is the residence of the Invisible, of the Son of Heaven--God! but the place is gloomy, hostile, savage, beneath this sombre sky!

We continue to advance under the old trees into what seems the park of death.

These dumb, closed palaces, seen first on one side, then on the other, are the Temple of the God of the Clouds, the Temple of Imperial Longevity, or the Temple of the Benediction of Sacred Mountains. Their names, inconceivable to us, the names of an Asiatic dream, make them still more unreal.

My companion assures me that this Yellow City is not always so terrible as it is to-day; for this weather is exceptional in a Chinese autumn, which is usually magnificently luminous. He promises me afternoons of warm sunshine in this wood, unique in all the world, where I shall make my home for several days.

"Now look," he said, "look! This is the Lake of the Lotus, and that is the Marble Bridge."

The Lake of the Lotus and the Marble Bridge! These two names have long been known to me as the names of things _which could not be seen_, but of things whose reputations had crossed insurmountable walls. They call up images of light and intense color, and are a surprise to me here in this mournful desert, in this icy wind.

The Lake of the Lotus! I had pictured it as sung by the Chinese poets, of an exquisite limpidity with great calices open to an abundance of water, a sort of aquatic plain covered with pink flowers, pink from one end to the other. And this is it!--This slime and this gloomy swamp, covered with dead leaves turned brown by the frost! It is infinitely larger than I supposed, this lake made by the hand of man; it goes on and on toward nostalgic shores, where ancient pagodas appear among the old trees, under the gray sky.

The Marble Bridge! Yes, this long, white arch supported by a series of white pillars, this exceedingly graceful curve, the balustrades with monsters' heads,--this all corresponds to the idea I had of it; it is very sumptuous and very Chinese. I had not, however, foreseen the two dead bodies decaying in their robes, which lay among the reeds at the entrance to the bridge.

The large dead leaves on the lake are really lotus-leaves; I recognize them now that I see them near at hand, and remember to have seen similar ones--but oh, so green and fresh--on the ponds of Nagasaki or of Yeddo. And there once must have been here the effect of an uninterrupted covering of pink blossoms; their fading stems rise now by thousands above the slime.

They will undoubtedly die, these fields of lotus, which for centuries have charmed the eyes of the emperors, for the lake is almost empty; it is the Allies who have turned its water into the canal that connects Pekin with the river, in order to re-establish this route which the Chinese had dried up for fear of its serving the purpose of the invaders.

The Marble Bridge, white and solitary, leads us across to the other bank of the lake, very narrow at this point, and there I shall find the Palace of the North, which is to be my residence. At first I do not see that there are enclosures within enclosures, all with great gates, dilapidated and in ruins. A dull light falls from the wintry sky through opaque clouds that are filled with snow.

In the centre of a gray wall there is a breach where an African chasseur is on guard; on one side lies a dead dog, on the other a pile of rags and filth breathing a corpse-like odor. This, it appears, is the entrance to my palace.

We are black with dust, powdered with snow, and our teeth are chattering with cold, when we finally get down from our chariot in a court encumbered with débris, where my comrade, Captain C., the aide-de-camp, comes to meet me. With an approach like this, one well might wonder if the promised palace were not chimerical.

Just back of this court there is, however, the first appearance of magnificence. Here and there is a long gallery of glass, light, elegant, and apparently intact, amid so much destruction. Through the panes one has glimpses of gold, porcelains, and imperial silks with designs of dragons and clouds. This is one corner of the palace, completely hidden until you are right upon it.

Oh, our evening meal on the night of our arrival in this strange dwelling! It is almost totally dark. At an ebony table my companion and I are seated, wrapped in our military cloaks with collars turned up, our teeth chattering with cold, and are served by our orderlies with trembling limbs. A feeble little Chinese candle of red wax, stuck in a bottle,--a candle picked up in the débris from some ancestral altar,--sheds a dim light, blown as it is by the wind. Our plates, in fact all the dishes, are of porcelain of inestimable value,--imperial yellow, marked with the cipher of a fastidious emperor, who was a contemporary of Louis XV. But our wine and our muddy water--boiled and reboiled for fear of poison in the wells--are in horrible old bottles with bits of potato, cut into shape by the soldiers, for corks.

The gallery where this scene takes place is very long; the distance is lost in obscurity where the splendors of an Asiatic tale are dimly perceived. Its sides are of glass up to the height of a man, and this frail wall is all that separates us from the sinister darkness which surrounds us; one has a feeling that the wandering forms outside, the phantoms attracted by our small light, may from a distance see us at table, and this is disturbing. Above the glass there is a series of light frames containing rice-paper, which reach to the ceiling, from which marvellous ebony sculptures depend, delicate as lacework; this rice-paper is torn, and allows the mortally cold night wind to strike us. Our frozen feet rest on imperial yellow carpets of the finest wool, with the five-horned dragons sprawling upon them. Close to us gigantic incense-burners of cloisonné of the old inimitable blue, with gold elephants as pedestals, are softly burning; there are magnificent and fanciful screens; phoenixes of enamel spread their long wings; thrones, monsters, things without age and without price abound. And there we are, inelegant, dusty, worn, soiled, with the air of coarse barbarians, installed like intruders in fairyland.

What must this gallery have been scarcely three months ago, when instead of silence and death there was life, music, and flowers; when a crowd of courtiers and servants in silken robes peopled these approaches so empty and ruined to-day; when the Empress, followed by the ladies of the palace, passed by dressed like goddesses!

Having finished our supper, which consisted of the regular army ration, having finished drinking our tea out of museum-like porcelain, now for the hour of smoking and conversation. No, we try in vain to think it amusing to be here, in this unforeseen and half fantastic way. It is too cold; the wind chills us to the marrow. We do not enjoy anything. We prefer to go off and to try to sleep.

My comrade, Captain C., who has taken possession of the place, leads me with a lantern and a few followers to the apartment set aside for me. It is on the _rez-de-chausée_, of course; there are no real stories in Chinese houses. As in the gallery, from which we come, there is nothing between me and the night outside but a few panes of glass, very light shades of white silk, and windows of rice-paper torn from one end to the other. As to the door, which is made of one great pane of glass, I fasten it with a cord, since there is no lock.

There are some admirable yellow rugs on the floor, thick as cushions. I have a big imperial bed of carved ebony, and my mattress and pillows are covered with precious silk embroidered in gold, but there are no sheets, although I have a soldier's gray woollen blanket.

* * * * *

To-morrow my companion tells me I may go and select from her Majesty's reserve supply whatever I wish in the way of further decorations for this room, as it can do no one any harm to move things about.

Assuring me that the gates of the outer enclosure, as well as the breach by which I entered, are guarded by sentinels, he retires with his orderlies to the other end of the palace.

Dressed, and with my boots on, I stretch myself out on the beautiful silk cushions, adding to my gray blanket an old sheepskin and two or three imperial robes embroidered with gold chimæras. My two servants arrange themselves in like manner on the floor. Before blowing out the red candle from some ancestral altar, I am constrained to admit in my secret soul that the accusation that we are "Occidental barbarians" has been completely confirmed since supper.

The wind has tormented and torn all that was left of the rice-paper in my panes; above me there is a perpetual sound like the movement of the wings of nocturnal birds or the flight of bats. I distinguish occasionally, although half asleep, a short fusillade or an isolated cry in the distance.

II

SUNDAY, October 21.

Cold, darkness, death, all that oppressed us last night, has disappeared with the morning light. The sun shines warm as a summer sun. The somewhat disordered Chinese magnificence which surrounds us is bright with the light of the East.

It is amusing to go on a voyage of discovery over this almost hidden palace, which lurks in a low spot, behind walls, under trees, looking quite insignificant as you approach it, but is, together with its dependencies, almost as large as a city.