Chapter X: Introduction (5)

But the heart of Hiouen-thsang told him that he must go. And he remembered that the caravans from India used to bring their strange wares to a city on the Hoang-ho--on the Yellow River. Secretly departing in the night, he traveled for many days, succored upon his way by the brethren, until he came to the caravansary, and saw the Indian merchants with their multitude of horses and of camels, resting beside the Hoang-ho.

And presently when they departed for the frontier, he followed secretly after them, with two Buddhist friends.

So they came to the frontier, where the line of the fortifications stretched away lessening into the desert, with their watch-towers fantastically capped, like Mandarins. But here only the caravan could pass; for the guards had orders from the Son of Heaven to seize upon Hiouen-thsang;--and the Indian merchants rode away far beyond the line of the watch-towers; and the caravan became only a moving speck against the disk of the sun, to disappear with his setting. Yet in the night Hiouen-thsang passed with his friends, like shadows, through the line of guards, and followed the trail.

Happily the captain in charge of the next watch-tower was a holy man, and moved by the supplications of the Buddhist priests, he permitted Hiouen-thsang to pass on. But the other brethren trembled and returned, leaving Hiouen-thsang alone. Yet India was still more than a thousand miles distant, by the way of the caravans.

Only the men of the last watch-tower would not allow Hiouen-thsang to pass; but he escaped by them into the desert. Then he followed the line of the caravan, the prints of the feet of camels and horses leading toward India. Skeletons were whitening in the sands; the eyeless sockets of innumerable skulls looked at him. The sun set and rose again many times; the sand-sea moved its waves continually with a rustling sound; the multitude of white bones waxed vaster. And as Hiouen-thsang proceeded phantom cities mocked him on the right hand and upon the left, and the spectral caravans wrought by the mirage rode by him shadowlessly. Then his water-skin burst, and the desert drank up its contents; the hoof-prints disappeared. Hiouen-thsang had lost his way....

From the past of twelve hundred years ago, we can hear the breaking of that water-skin;--we can feel the voiceless despair that for a moment chilled the heart and faith of Hiouen-thsang--alone in the desert of skeletons--alone in the infinite platitude of sand broken only by the mockeries of the mirage. But the might of faith helped him on; prayers were his food, Buddha the star-compass that illuminated the path to India. For five days and five nights he traveled without meat or drink under blistering suns, under the vast throbbing of stars--and at last the sharp yellow line of the horizon became green!

It was not the mirage--it was a land of steel-bright lakes and long grass--the land of the men who live upon horseback--the country of the Oigour Tartars.

The Khan received the pilgrim as a son; honors were showered upon him--for the fame of Hiouen-thsang as a teacher of the Law had reached into the heart of Asia. And they desired that he should remain with them, to instruct them in the knowledge of Buddha. When he would not--only after having vainly essayed upon him such temptation and coercion by turns that he was driven to despair, the Khan at last permitted him to depart under oath that he would return. But India was still far away. Hiouen-thsang had to pass through the territories of twenty-four great kings ere reaching the Himalayas. The Khan gave him an escort and letters to the rulers of all kingdoms, for his memory is yet blessed in the Empire Celestial.

It was in the seventh century. Rivers have changed their courses since then. Hiouen-thsang visited the rulers of kingdoms that have utterly disappeared; he beheld civilizations where are now wastes of sand; he conversed with masters of a learning that has vanished without leaving a trace behind. The face of the world is changed; but the words of Hiouen-thsang change not;--lakes have dried up, yet we even now in this Western republic drink betimes from that Fountain of Gold which Hiouen-thsang set flowing--to flow forever!

So they beheld at last, afar off, the awful Himalayas, whose white turbans touch the heaven of India, vested with thunder-clouds, belted with lightnings! And Hiouen-thsang passed through gorges overhung by the drooping fangs of monsters of ice--through ravines so dark that the traveler beholds the stars above him at noonday, and eagles like dots against the sky--and hard by the icy cavern whence the sacred river leaps in roaring birth--and by winding ways to valleys eternally green--and ever thus into the glowing paradise of Hindustan. But of those that followed Hiouen-thsang, thirteen were buried in the eternal snow.

He saw the wondrous cities of India; he saw the sanctuaries of Benares; saw the great temples since destroyed for modern eyes by Moslem conquerors; saw the idols that had diamond eyes and bellies filled with food of emeralds and carbuncles; he trod where Buddha had walked; he came to Maghada, which is the Holy Land of India. Alone and on foot he traversed the jungles; the cobra hissed under his feet, the tiger glared at him with eyes that flamed like emeralds, the wild elephant's mountain-shadow fell across his path. Yet he feared nothing, for he sought Buddha. The Phansigars flung about his neck the noose of the strangler, and yet loosened him on beholding the holiness of his face; swarthy robbers, whose mustaches were curved like scimitars, lifted their blades to smite, and beholding his eyes turned away. So he came to the Dragon-Cavern of Purushapura to seek Buddha. For Buddha, though having entered Nirvana a thousand years, sometimes there made himself visible as a luminous Shadow to those who loved him.

But in the cavern was a darkness as of the grave, a silence as of death; Hiouen-thsang prayed in vain, and vainly wept for many hours in the darkness. At last there came a faint glow upon the wall, like a beam of the moon--and passed away. Then Hiouen-thsang prayed yet more fervently than before; and again in the darkness came a light--but a fierce brightness as of lightning, as quickly passing away. Yet a third time Hiouen-thsang wept and prayed; and a white glory filled all the black cavern--and brighter than the sun against that glory appeared the figure and face of Buddha, holier of beauty than all conceptions of man. So that Hiouen-thsang worshiped with his face to the earth. And Buddha smiled upon him, making the heart of the pilgrim full of sunshine--but the Divine spoke not, inasmuch as he had entered into Nirvana a thousand years.

After this Hiouen-thsang passed sixteen years in the holy places, copying the Law, and seeking the words of Buddha in books that had been written in languages no longer spoken. Of these he obtained one thousand three hundred and thirty-five volumes. Other volumes there were in the Island of Elephants far to the South--in sultry Ceylon; but thither it was not permitted him to go.

He was a youth when he fled from China into the desert; he was a gray man when he returned. The Emperor that had forbade his going now welcomed his return, with processions of tremendous splendor, in which were borne the Golden Dragon and numberless statues in gold. But Hiouen-thsang withdrew from all honors into a monastery in the mountains, desiring to spend the rest of his life only in translating the word of Buddha contained in those many hundred books which he had found. And of these before his death he translated seven hundred and forty into one thousand three hundred and thirty-five volumes, as the books of the Chinese are made. Having completed his task, he passed away in the midst of great sorrow;--the Empire wept for him--four hundred millions mourned for him.

Did he see the Shadow of Buddha smile upon him before he passed away, as he saw it in the Dragon-Cavern at Purushapura?... It is said that five others with him also beheld that luminous presence in the cave. Yet we may well believe that he only saw it--faith-created; for Buddha having passed into Nirvana may be sought only in the hearts of men, and seen only by the eyes of faith!

Twelve hundred years ago Hiouen-thsang devoted his life to the pursuit of that he believed to be Truth--abandoned all things for what he held to be Duty--encountered such hardships as perhaps no other man ever encountered in the search for Wisdom. To-day nations that were unborn in his years are reaping the fruits of his grand sacrifice of self. His travels have been recently translated into the French tongue; his own translations are aiding the philologists of the nineteenth century to solve historical and ethnical problems; Max Müller lectures[35] upon his wonderful mission to India in the seventh century; and stories from the books he brought back from Maghada are in the hands of American readers. Who shall say that there is no goodness without the circle of Christianity!--who declare that heroism and unselfishness, and truth, and purest faith may not exist save within the small sphere of what we fancy the highest ethical civilization! The pilgrims to the Indian Palestine, the martyrs of the Indian Christ, are surely the brethren of all whom we honor in the history of self-abnegation and the good fight for truth.

L'AMOUR APRÈS LA MORT[36]

No rest he knew because of her. Even in the night his heart was ever startled from slumber as by the echo of her footfall; and dreams mocked him with tepid fancies of her lips; and when he sought forgetfulness in strange kisses her memory ever came shadowing between.... So that, weary of his life, he yielded it up at last in the fevered summer of a tropical city,--dying with her name upon his lips. And his face was no more seen in the palm-shadowed streets;--but the sun rose and sank even as before.

And that vague Something which lingers a little while within the tomb where the body moulders, lingered and dreamed within the long dark resting-place where they had laid him with the pious hope--Que en paz descanse!

Yet so weary of his life had the Wanderer been that the repose of the dead was not for him. And while the body shrank and sank into dust, the phantom man found no rest in the darkness, and thought dimly to himself: _"I am even too weary to find peace!_"

There was a thin crevice in the ancient wall of the tomb. And through it, and through the meshes of a web that a spider had woven athwart it, the dead looked and beheld the amethystine blaze of the summer sky--and pliant palms bending in the warm wind--and the opaline glow of the horizon, and fair pools bearing images of cypresses inverted--and the birds that flitted from tomb to tomb and sang--and flowers in the shadow of the sepulchres ...And the vast bright world seemed to him not so hateful as before.

Likewise the sounds of life assailed the faint senses of the dead through the thin crevice in the wall of the tomb:--always the far-off, drowsy murmur made by the toiling of the city's heart; sometimes sounds of passing converse and of steps--echoes of music and of laughter--chanting and chattering of children at play--and the liquid babble of beautiful brown women.

...So that the dead man dreamed of life and strength and joy, and the litheness of limbs to be loved: also of that which had been, and of that which might have been, and of that which now could never be. And he longed at last to live again--seeing that there was no rest in the tomb.

But the gold-born days died in golden fire; and blue nights unnumbered filled the land with indigo-shadows; and the perfume of the summer passed like a breath of incense--and the dead within the sepulchre could not wholly die.

Stars in their courses peered down through the crevices of the tomb, and twinkled, and passed on; winds of the sea shrieked to him through the widening crannies of the tomb; birds sang above him and flew to other lands; the bright lizards that ran noiselessly over his bed of stone, as noiselessly departed; the spider at last ceased to repair her web of elfin silk; years came and went with lentor inexpressible; but for the dead there was no rest!

And after many tropical moons had waxed and waned, and the summer was deepening in the land, filling the golden air with tender drowsiness and passional perfume, it strangely came to pass that _She_, whose name had been murmured by his lips when the Shadow of Death fell upon him, came to that city of palms, and even unto the ancient place of sepulture, and unto the tomb that was nameless.

And he knew the whisper of her raiment--knew the sweetness of her presence--and the pallid hearts of the blossoms of a plant whose blind roots had found food within the crevice of the tomb, changed and flushed, and flamed incarnadine....

But She--perceiving it not--passed by; and the sound of her footstep died away forever.

THE POST-OFFICE[37]