Chapter II: Part 2

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

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

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.