Chapter IV: Part 4

Arriving from the horizon, our ship is confronted by the wharf of the Earth; and the continent, emerging, spreads its immense architecture out before us. In the morning distinguished by one great star, as I mount the gangway the earth’s blue apparition appears before my eyes. To defend the sun against the pursuit of the restless ocean, this continent has established the deep-set solidity of its ramparts. Their breaches open into a happy countryside.

For a long time in the full daylight we follow the frontier of another world. Carried along by the trade-winds, our ship veers and rebounds upon the resilient abyss to which it confides its whole weight. I am caught up to the Azure, I am stuck there like a cask. Captive of the infinite, suspended at the intersection of sky and water, I see below me all the somber Earth laid out like a chart--the whole world, humble and enormous! My separation from it is irrevocable. All things are far from me, and only sight connects me with them. It will never again be vouch-safed me to set my foot on the solid earth, to construct with my hands a dwelling of wood and stone, to eat in peace food cooked at the domestic fire. Soon we will turn our prow toward the shoreless sea; and, under an immense spread of sail, our advance into the midst of eternity will be shown only by our signal lights.

SALUTATION

And again I am permitted to salute this land similar to Gessen and Canaan. Tonight, as our ship tossed in the wheat-colored moonlight, at the entrance to the river, what a sign the Dog-Star was to me, low beyond the sea; the golden watchman at the foot of a stretch of stars, glowing splendor at the far horizon! These flowing waters having led us into the heart of the countryside, I disembark, and on my road I see below me the image of the round sun repeated in the fields, ruddy in the green rice.

It is neither cold, nor too warm. All nature has the warmth of my body. How the feeble cry of these crickets touches me! At this end of the season, in this testamentary moment, the union of the sky and the earth (less sacramental today than it is amorous) consummates the matrimonial solemnity.

O cruel destiny! Is repose always apart from me? Is there no peace for the heart of man? A spirit born for one only joy can pardon no delay. Absolute possession some day will not dry my tears! No joy of mine will be sufficient to make reparation for the bitterness of this grief.

And I will salute this earth; not only with a frivolous jet of intricate phrases, but with the sudden discovery in me of an immense discourse circling the foot of the mountain like that sea of wheat crossed by a triple river. Like that plain and its roads, I fill the space between the mountains. With both eyes lifted toward the eternal mountains, I salute the venerable body of the earth. Through the air I no longer see its mere semblance, but its very flank, the gigantic assemblage of its limbs. O borders of the slope all about me! It is through you that we receive the waters of the sky, and you are the recipients of the Offering!

This damp morning, at the turn of the road between the tomb and the tree, I saw the somber and enormous hill barred at the foot by the flashing line of a river, which stood out like a stream of milk in the light of noon.

Like a body sinking through water of its own weight, during these four motionless hours I have been advancing to the heart of the light, feeling a divine resistance. I am holding myself erect in perfectly white air. While I cast no shadow, I am celebrating the orgy of the maturity of day.

No longer, under the sudden brilliance of a greedy sun, does the earth burst into violent flowering. Lustral moment! A continual breath blows to us from between the Orient and the North. The opulent harvest, the trees weighed down with their burdens, stir ceaselessly under the soft irresistible wind. The fruits of the great earth are stirred in the purifying splendor. The sky is no longer high above us; brought low, it submerges and damps us. I, a new Hylas (like one who watches fishes below him suspended in watery spaces) see through this milkiness, this silver wherein I am drowned, a dazzling white bird with a pink throat flash into sight and lose itself in a brilliance that my eye cannot sustain.

The whole day does not exhaust my salutation. At the somber hour,--when the wedding procession, armed with flaming torches, conducts the bridal carriage through the forest of orange trees, with all my being I lift applause and acclamation toward the red Sign I see upraised above the wild circle of flaming mountains.

I salute the threshold, the material evidence of Hope, the recompense of man uncompromised; I lift my hands toward this exposition of the color of life! Autumnal triumph, the foliage above my head is thick with little oranges! But once again my gaze, which has been uplifted toward Death from infancy, must return to mankind; like the singer who, with parted lips, waits to carry on his part--his heart lost in the beat of the music, his eye on his score.

THE HANGING HOUSE

By a subterranean stairway I descend to the hanging house. Just as the swallow fashions her shelter with patience, between the planks and the rafter, and the seagull glues her nest like a pannier to the rock; so, by a system of clamps, bolts, and girders driven into the stone, the wooden box that I inhabit is solidly attached to the arch of an enormous porch hollowed in the mountain itself. A trap-door arranged in the floor connects me with the world; by means of it on both these days, letting my little basket drop at the end of a cord, I have drawn it up filled with a little rice, some roasted pistachio nuts, and vegetables pickled in brine. In a corner of the formidable masonry, like a trophy made of Medusa’s tresses, hangs a fountain whose inexhaustible lament is carried away in a whirlpool. I draw up the water I need by means of a cord knotted in open meshes, and the smoke of my cooking mingles with the spray of the cascade.

The torrent is lost among the Palms, and I see below me the crowns of the great trees from which they draw sacerdotal perfumes. And, as a shattering of crystal is enough to disturb the night, all the keyboard of the earth is awakened by this neutral, hollow jingling of rain on that deep flint.

I see in the monstrous niche where I am ensconced the very tympanum of the massive mountain, like an ear hollowed in the temporal rock. And, collecting all my attention, bending all my joints, I will attempt to hear, above the murmur of leaves and birds, those sounds which this enormous and secret pavilion undoubtedly gives access to: the oscillations of the universal waters, the shifting of geological strata, the groans of the hurtling earth under an effort contrary to gravitation.

Once a year the moon rises at my left above this escarpment, cutting the shadows at the height of my waist on so exact a level that, with ever so little more delicacy and precaution, I could float a plate of copper upon it. But I like best the last step of the stairway, which descends into the void. Many times I have awakened from meditation, bathed in the dews of the night like a rose-bush; or, in the comfortable afternoon, I have appeared to throw handfuls of dry letches like little red bells to the monkeys perched below me on the furthest branches.

THE SPRING

The crow, adjusting one eye on me as the clock-maker does on his watch, would see me, a precise, miniature person--a cane like a dart between my fingers--advancing by the straight footpath, moving briskly along.

The country, between the mountains that enclose it, is as flat as the bottom of a frying-pan. To right and left the work of harvesting goes on; they shear the earth as if it were a sheep. I dispute the width of the path, and my place on it, with an uninterrupted file of workers; those who are going to the fields, spade at belt; those who are returning, bending like scales under the weight of double baskets whose form is at once round and square, joining the symbols of the earth and the sky.

I walk a long time; the open air is as close as a room, the sky is somber, and the long columns of stagnant smoke are stationary like the remains of some barbaric pyre. I leave the shorn rice-fields and the harvest-fields of slime; and, little by little, I mount the narrowing gorge. Useless reeds succeed the fields of sugar-cane; and three times, with shoes in hands, I cross the rapid waters gathered into the current of a river. I have undertaken to find the source of one of these streams that feed the river, here, where it arises in the heart of a five-gorged valley. The ascent becomes more difficult as the thread of the cascade extends. I leave beneath me the last field of potatoes, and, all at once, I have entered into a wood like that which on Parnassus served for the assembly of the Muses! All about me the tea-plants lift their distorted shoots and their dry, somber foliage,--so high that my stretched hand cannot reach it. Charming retreat! Quaint and mysterious shadow, enameled with a perpetual flowering! A delicate perfume, which seems to survive rather than emanate, flatters the nostril while recreating the spirit. And in a hollow I discover the spring! Like grain out of a furious hopper the water from beneath the earth bursts forth, leaping and bubbling. Impurities are absorbed. Only that which is pure, untainted at the source, leaps out. Born of the roseate sky (gathered in what profound matrix!) the virgin water, with living force, pours from the opening like a cry. Happy those from whom a new word bursts with violence! May my mouth be supplied forever like this spring,--which, sustained by a perpetual, solitary renewal, cares not that it must serve for the works of Man,--for those lowlands where, spreading wide and inundating the tilth, it will nourish the vast, stagnant harvest-fields.

THE TIDE AT NOON

When the time comes that he can sail no longer, the mariner makes his home near the sea; and when it moans he rises to watch, unable to sleep longer; like a nurse who hears a little child complain in the night.

I do likewise, and, by the living virtue of the sea in my blood, my mind communicates with the movement of the waters as does a city by its secret drains.

While I am speaking or writing, resting or eating, I participate in the sea, which rises toward or recedes from me. And often at noon, temporary citizen of this commercial coast, I gaze on what the tide brings us: the tribute of the ocean gathered into this flowing channel in one wide current of yellow water.

I observe the approach of all the people of the sea, the procession of ships towed by the tide as if on the chain of a barge, the junks with their four bulging sails as smooth and stiff as blades, in a puff of wind. Those from Foutchéou carry an enormous fagot of beams lashed to each side; then, among a scattering of tri-colored sampans, come the giants of Europe, the American sailing ships full of gasoline; all the “camels” of Madian, all the cargoes of Hamburg and London, all the carriers of the Coast and the Islands.

The air is very clear. I enter into a light so pure that neither my secret conscience, it seems, nor my body, offer resistance to it. It is deliciously cool. With closed mouth, I breathe the sunlight, my nostrils open to the exhilarating air. Meanwhile noon sounds from the tower of the Customs; the ball of the semaphore drops, all the boats mark off the hour, cannon thunder, the Angelus rings its part, the whistles of the factories mingle with the long tumult of the siren.

All humanity gathers together to eat; the sampan man at the stern of his skiff, lifting a wooden cover, surveys with a contented eye the simmering of his stew. The wharf-hands, tied up in thick bundles of rags, each yoke carried over the shoulder like a pike, surround the open-air kitchen; those who are already served, all laughing, seated on the edges of the wheelbarrows, with bowls of smoking rice between their hands, test the heat with the ends of their greedy tongues.

The regulator of Life’s level rises; all the sluices of the earth are filled; the rivers suspend their course; and the sea, mingling her salt with their sands, joins them, to drink fully at their mouths. It is the hour of plenitude. Now the tortuous canals which cross the city become long serpents of close-packed barges advancing amid vociferations; and the irresistible waters, in their expansion, float bridges of boats and dead bodies from the mud, like corks.

THE PERIL OF THE SEA

As I cannot eat, I remount to the poop, a piece of bread in my pocket; and, staggering, deafened, blown about, I join in the wild darkness and the indescribable confusion of noise. In this void, opening my lips, I carry a mouthful blindly to them. Soon, leaving the binnacle, little by little I can make out the form of the ship, and beyond, just at the limit of the contracted horizon, the sea in the clutches of the wind. In that black circle, I see the pale charging cavalry of the foam.

Nowhere about me is there solidity. I stand amid chaos. I am lost in the inner caverns of Death. My heart is grasped by the bitterness of the last hour. This is no menace brandished at me; it is simply that I have intruded into the uninhabitable. I am of no importance. I am voyaging through an indifferent element. I am at the mercy of the moods of the deep, of the mind, of the powers of the abyss. In the cataclysm that surrounds me, no compact holds; and the handful of human souls which this narrow vessel contains, may be scattered over the waters like a basket of bran. A delicate balance sustains me on the bosom of this abyss which is ready to join with my own weight and engulf me.

To escape this disheartening sight, I go to my cabin and to bed. Head to the wind, the boat lifts to the surge; and every once in a while the enormous hull, with its iron plate and boilers, its armament and storerooms filled with coal and projectiles, settles back upon the waves like a rider who gathers himself, gripping tightly with his knees, before a leap.

Then a little calm comes, and below me I hear the screw continue its feeble and homely sound.

But before the day which follows is ended, our ship enters the lonely port enclosed like a reservoir by a mountain range. Here is Life again! Touched with an artless joy, I may resume my survey of the brisk and lively spectacle, of the spontaneous play of common interests, of this assiduous, multifold, intermingled activity by which all things exist together.

Just as we drop anchor, the sun, through a gap in the mountains which hide it, shoots toward the earth four jets of fire so intense that they seem emissions of its very substance. Before raising them vertically to the illimitable sky, this king, appearing upon the highest ridge (Eye of our eyes, in the merciful possession of the Vision made visible!) makes, at this supreme hour, a majestic exposition of distance and origin. For a welcome I have this farewell, richer than a promise! The mountain is vestured in rose and violet, the marriage of light and night. I am overcome with a deep, strong sweetness. I lift to God my gratitude still to be alive, and my whole being expands in the realization of my reprieve.

This time I shall not drink the bitter waters!

ON LIGHT

I do not think--I entirely reject the idea that colors constitute the first element, and that the sun is only the synthesis of their spectrum. I cannot see that the sun may be white, and that each color gives a share of its own virtue to it, and that their accord determines it. There is no color without an extrinsic support; from which we learn that it is itself an exterior thing, the diverse witness that matter renders to the pure source of indivisible splendor. Do not pretend to separate light; since it is light which divides darkness, producing seven notes according to the intensity of its effort. A vase of water or a prism, by the interposition of a transparent and thick medium and the refractive play of facets, allows us to watch this in the act. The free direct ray remains invariable, but color appears as soon as there is a captured refraction, which matter takes to itself as an especial attribute. The prism, in the calculated dispersive powers of its three angles and the concerted action of its dihedral triple mirror, encloses all possible play of reflections, and restores to the light its _equivalent in color_. I compare light to a woven substance,--where the rays constitute the warp, and where the wave of color, always implying a repercussion, is the woof. Color is nothing more than that.

If I examine the rainbow or the spectrum projected on a wall, I see a gradation in the nature of the tints, as well as in their relative intensity. Yellow occupies the center of the spectrum and permeates it to each edge, where the outer tones exclude it by degrees of obscuration. We can understand it to be the most immediate veil of light, while red and blue are reciprocal images of light metamorphized into two equally balanced tones. Light plays the rôle of mediator; it prepares the mixed colors by blending them in neighboring bands, thus provoking complementary tones. In it and by it, extreme red combined with green--as blue combines with orange--disappears in the unity of white.

Color, then, is a particular phenomenon of reflection, which the reflecting body, penetrated by the light, appropriates and restores in an altered form. This form is the result of the ray’s complete and ruthless analysis and examination which will not be denied.

And the intensity of tones varies, following a gamut of which yellow is the keynote, according to the more or less complete response of matter to the solicitations of the light.

Who would not be shocked with the affirmation of the classic theory that the color of an object results from its absorption of all the colored rays except that one whose livery it seems to wear? On the contrary, I should think that color, which constitutes the visible individuality of each thing, is an original and authentic quality in it; and that the color of the rose is no less its property than the perfume.

That which we measure is not the rapidity of light, but simply the resistance that its surroundings oppose to it, while transforming it.

And visibility itself is only one of the properties of light; differing with different subjects.

HOURS IN THE GARDEN

There are people whose eyes alone are sensitive to light; and to them, for the most part, the sun is but a free lantern, by whose light every one carries on his especial work; the writer with his pen, the farmer with his ox. But I absorb the light with my eyes and ears, my mouth and nose, and all the pores of my skin. Like a fish, I float in it and I drink it in.

Just as they say the fires of morning and afternoon will ripen wine that is exposed in bottles, as though it were still the grapes on the vine; so the sunlight penetrates my blood and clears my brain. Rejoice in this tranquil and piercing hour! I am like seaweed in the current, moored only by a thread, its weight floating on the water,--or like the Australian palm; a tuft with great swaying leaves, high upon a tall trunk,--which last, flecked with the gold of evening, curl, wave, and uncurl with the outspread balance of wide and supple wings.

The formidable aloe sprang, undoubtedly, from one of the dragon’s teeth that Cadmus sowed over the Theban field. The sun drew this warrior from a ferocious soil. It has a heart of sword-blades, a flowering of glaucous thongs, belts, and straps. Sentinel of solitude, color of the sea and the sword, its artichoke bristles on all sides with enormous poniards. Persistently it upraises its harrows, rank after rank, until, having flowered, it dies; and from its heart springs a flower like a post, like a candelabra, like a standard driven into the final corpse!

By my order they have closed the door with bolt and bar. The porter sleeps in his corner, his head sunk on his breast; all the servants sleep. Only a pane of glass separates me from the garden; and the silence is so complete that, all the way to the walls of the enclosure, the mice between two floors, the lice in the breasts of the pigeons, the bubble of a dandelion on its fragile stem, must feel the noise in their midst as I open the door. The celestial spaces appear to me, with the sun just where I had imagined it, in the afternoon splendor. On high, a kite descends in wide circles through the blue; from the summit of a pine a cone falls. I am glad to be where I am. My walks in this enclosed place are distinguished by precaution and a taciturn and quiet vigilance,--as a fisher fears to startle fish in the water if he so much as thinks. There is no trace here of that free and open country which distracts the mind and leads on the body. The trees and the flowers conspire to my captivity; and, as in a child’s game the player must continually go back and begin again, so all the turns in this thick grass lead me to that furthest corner, where the wells are. Across the little hill, by means of a long cord, I shake the invisible pail. Like a ripening fruit, like a poet maturing his thought, I rest in the immobility all about me where life is measured only by the circling of the sun, by the beating of my pulse,--by the growth of my hair. Vainly the turtle-dove makes her pure and sad appeal, heard from afar. I will not stir from the house today. In vain the murmur of the great river reaches me.

At midnight, returning from a ball where, during many hours, I have watched human beings,--some in black, others in quainter draperies,--turning in couples (each figure expressing incomprehensible satisfaction) to the gymnastic modulations of a piano; at the moment when the porters who have reached the top of the stairway lift the curtain of my litter, I see in the light of my lantern, under the torrential rain, a magnolia tree adorned with great ivory globes. Oh, fresh apparition! Oh, confirmation of imperishable treasure in the night!

The theme of the earth is expressed by the detonations of this distant drum, as one might hear a cooper in a cavernous cellar striking his casks with measured blows. The magnificence of the world is such that one anticipates at any moment having the silence shattered by the terrific explosion of a cry, the _taraba_ of a trumpet,--the delirious exultation, the intoxicated elation of copper! The news goes about that the rivers have reversed their courses; and, charging the swollen streams, all the battering force of the sea descends upon the island continent, to trade there the produce of the horizon. The work of the fields benefits by this change; chain-pumps function and confabulate; and, as far as the inundated harvest-meadows, mingled with the somber prairie, mirror the guava-colored evening, all space is filled with an hydraulic murmur. A ragged tuft of pine crosses the circle of the moon. In another place, at this most shining hour, four lovers holding a sugar-cane, stamping on the golden wheels of a press, make a stream of blue and white milk flow like the water of the sea through a very green field. And suddenly, against the blue, is thrust this young Bacchic face, inflamed with passion and with a superhuman gaiety, the eye sparkling and cynical, the lips twisted in mockery and invective! But the heavy blows of a hatchet in meat show me clearly enough where I am; and also the arms of this woman who, red to the elbows with blood dark as tobacco juice, drags out entrails from the depth of that great pearl-white carcass. A basin of iron, that some one turns over, flashes. In the rosy and golden light of Autumn, the whole bank of the canal is screened from my sight under pulleys which draw great blocks of ice, baskets of pigs, unwieldy bunches of bananas, streaming clusters of oysters, like pudding-stones,--and barrels of edible fishes so large that they are garnished and polished like porcelain. I have the energy still to notice these scales, where, with one foot placed on the platform, one fist clinging to the chain of bronze, they overturn the mighty heap of watermelons and pumpkins, and bundles of sugar-cane, tied with blossoming creepers from which spring tiny lip-colored flowers. And suddenly, lifting my chin, I find myself seated on a step of the stairway, my hand in the fur of my cat.

THE BRAIN

The brain is an organ. The student will acquire a solid principle if he grasps this idea firmly: that the nervous organism is homogeneous in its center and in its ramifications, and that its function is simply such as its mechanical efficiency determines. Nothing justifies the excessive belief which imputes to the “white” or “gray” matter (accessory to sensory and motor activity) the function of secreting the intelligence and the will, as the liver does bile. A confusion in terms seems to imply it. The brain is an organ, like the stomach and the heart; and, just as the digestive or circulatory systems have their precise function, the nervous system has its own, which is the production of sensation and movement.

I use the word “production” designedly. It would be inexact to see in the nerves simply threads bound together, agents inert in themselves, of a double transmission; “afferent” (as they say) here; “efferent” there; ready indifferently to telegraph a noise, a shock, or an order of the inner mind. The apparatus assures the opening of a cerebral wave, constant as a pulse, to all the body. Sensation is not a passive phenomenon; it is a special state of activity. I compare it to a vibrating cord, on which the note is formed by the correct position of the fingers. By sensation, I verify facts; by movement, I control action. But the vibration is constant.

And this view permits us to advance our investigation further. All vibration implies a source, as all circles have a center. The source of nerve vibration resides in the brain, which, separated from all the other organs, fills the entire cavity of the sealed skull.

The rule of analogy, at the outset, forbids seeing in it anything but the agent of reception, of transformation, and of digestion (so to speak) of the initial commotion. One can imagine that this duty has devolved especially on the peripheric matter which the white substratum forms, as an agency of amplification and of composition; and finally, that the complicated organs of the base of the brain are so many laboratories, setting the scene for distribution, arranging keyboards, installing the apparatus of substitution and of regulation.

We must now consider the vibration itself. By this I mean a double movement,--one by which a body proceeds from a point to return to it. Here is the element we seek,--the symbol which constitutes essentially all life. The vibration of our brain is the agitation of the source of life, the emotion of matter in contact with that Divine Unity whose possession constitutes our typical personality.

This is the umbilical cord of our dependence. The nerves, and the contact that they give us with the exterior world, are but the instruments of our knowledge; and it is in this sense alone that they are the conditions of it. As one makes trial of a tool, so we fashion the education of our senses. We learn to know the world through its contact with our intimate identity.

The brain, then, is nothing but the organ of animal intelligence, sensitive only in the animals, intelligent in man. But, since it is merely a particular organ, it cannot be the support of the mind, nor of the soul. We could not do this discourtesy to any part of our body, which is the active and living image of God. The human soul is that by which the human body is what it is,--its act, its continually operating seed, and (as the Schools would say) its form.

LEAVING THE LAND

The sea has come to seek us. She pulls at our cable, she draws the side of our boat away from the gangway. With a great quiver, it increases little by little the distance that separates it from the encumbered wharf and the port of seething life. And we follow the heavy tranquil water in its lazy windings. Here is one of the mouths by which the earth disgorges, spewing its thick muddy waters forth to mingle with the tangled grasses of the sea. Of the soil where we once dwelt, there remains only its crude color, ready to liquefy. And, right before us, a fire low down in the limpid air indicates the horizon and the desert.

While we are eating, I feel that the boat has stopped. Through its body, and through my own, there is freer breathing. The pilot is disembarking. Under the electric light on his dancing canoe, he salutes us with a wave of the hand. They cast off the ladder, and we depart. We depart in the light of the moon!

And I see the curved line of the horizon before me, like the frontier of immeasurable slumber. All my heart despairs, with the thick sob one utters falling asleep, as the shore recedes behind us and fades out of sight. Ah, Sea, it is thou! I re-enter. There is no bosom so sweet as Eternity, and no security comparable to uncircumscribed Space. Our news hereafter will be that each evening will bring us the moon, rising on our left. I am delivered from change and from diversity. Here there are no vicissitudes but those of day and night; no solicitation but the sky’s before our eyes, and no repose but the bosom of these great waters which reflect it.

Cleansing purity! Here we may be absolved in the Absolute. What matter now the fermentation of people, the intrigues of marriages and wars, the operation of gold and of economic forces, and all the confused scheme of things below? Everything is simplified to the immediate act, according to the multifold passion of men and of things. Here I possess the central rhythm in its essence: the alternating rising and setting of the sun, and a simple fact; the appearance of the constellations on the horizon at an appointed hour.

And all day long I study the sea as one studies the eyes of a woman who understands. I follow its reflection with the attentiveness of one who listens. In comparison with this pure mirror, how fare the gross intricacies of your tragedies and your ostentations?

1900-1905

THE LAMP AND THE BELL

Of this sense of expectation through all the universe (and of my regret still to be alive) one is the sign and the other the expression. One is Duration itself, and the other--suddenly sonorous--marks a moment. One measures silence, the other probes obscurity. One solicits me and the other fascinates me. Oh sentinel, oh bitter patience,--double vigilance! While one flames, the other apportions.

The night takes away our witnesses, we no longer know where we are. Lines and tints, our personal arrangement of the world all around us (whose center we carry about with us, according to the angle from which our eye gazes at the moment), these are no longer present to show us our position. We are reduced to ourselves. Our vision has no longer the visible for limit, but the invisible for its cell. Homogeneous, close, impassive, compact, in the bosom of this obscurity the lamp is clear and definite. It appears full of life, it contains its own oil. By virtue of its flame it is able to drink itself. It attests that of which all the abyss is the absence. As it has taken a sufficient supply in the evening, it will last until rosy light is in the sky, until the dispersing of vapors like the fumes of new wine. It has a golden provision to last till dawn. As for me, let me not die in the night! Let me endure until the day! Let me not be extinguished except in light!

But if the night closes our eyes, it is in order that we may listen the more. Not only with the ears, but with the hearing of our soul--breathing as fishes do. Something accumulates, in the darkness: a number that must be sounded. I hear the bell, like the necessity for speech, like our inner silence summarized, like the Word speaking in secret. During the day we hear a whirlpool of ceaseless words weaving through the activities of human beings. The night extinguishes them, and only the measuring of Time remains. (I see, I listen). What does this clock apportion? What is measured? What strikes? What is Time? Here, to betray it, is the artifice of hourglass and clepsydra; the snare of a clock forces the hour to declare itself. I see it; the duration of time is reported to me; I am ruled by this march of time and of all the hours. I have my escape, I contain the creative pulse; outside of me the blow which suddenly resounds declares all the hidden effort of my heart, the motor and the worker in my body.

Just as the navigator follows the coast of a continent, verifying all the lights one after another; so, midway between horizons, the astronomer standing on the moving earth, like a mariner on his bridge, calculates the exact hour with his eyes on the most complete sextant of all. The enormous scheme of things, the innumerable universe is reduced to the establishing of these proportions, to the elaboration of these distances! There is no trembling of the stars that does not influence our emotions, no design woven by the harmony of the planets in which we may not be involved. There is no star revealed by the microscope on the photographic plate to which I may be indifferent. The hour strikes, and by its act the immense sky seems to lighten. Between the pendulum buried in the heart of a sick-room and the flaming angel which successively reaches in the sky all the points prescribed by its circular flight, there is an exact response. I shall not compute another hour; I shall not face it with less decision for all that.

THE DELIVERANCE OF AMATERASU

No mortal man can, without incongruity, honor the moon by a public devotion. She is the computer and the fabricator of our months, the spinner of a thread avariciously measured. In the clear light of day we rejoice to see everything in harmony, beautiful like an ample, multicolored fabric. But as soon as the night is come, I find the fatal shuttle weaving again across the web of the sky. My friend, may thine eye alone avow it, glamoured by its evil light,--and those five fingernails which shine on the handle of thy lute! But the sun, always pure and young, always the same,--intensely radiant, intensely white,--does it abate each day the flowering of its glory, the generosity of its face? And who can look at it without being forced to laugh also? With a laugh as free, then, as when you gather up a pretty little child, give your heart to the good sun! Why, in the most shallow waters, in the narrowest puddle left at the turning of the public road, it will find something to mirror its ruddy face; and shall the secret soul of Man alone remain so sealed that it refuses such an image, and shows in the depth of its shadows no touch of gold?

Scarcely had the shabby race of sons of the soil commenced to dabble in the mud of the nourishing earth than, pressed by the furious desire to eat, they forgot the splendid sun, the eternal epiphany in which they were permitted to live. As the engraver, applying himself to cut his block according to the grain of the wood, occupies himself but little with the lamp above his head, which lights him; just so the farmer, reducing his whole view to that of his two hands and the black back of his buffalo, caring only to plow his furrows straight, forgot the luminous heart of the universe. Then Amaterasu was indignant in the sun. She is the soul of the sun by which it shines, and she is the breath in its sounding trumpet. “When the beasts,” she said, “have filled their bellies, they love me, they rejoice with simplicity in my caresses; they sleep in the warmth of my glance, lulled by the regular beating of their blood within their bodies, the inner rhythm of their crimson life; but Man, brutal and impious, is never sated with eating. All day long the flowers adore me, and nourish their devout hearts in the splendor of my face. Only Man is badly set on his stem. He deprives me of the sacred mirror in him that was made for my reflection. Let us fly, then, let us hide this beauty that is not honored!” Like a dove which slips into a hole in a wall, she descended into a deep cavern at the mouth of the river Yokigawa and, with an enormous rock, hermetically sealed the enclosure.

It grew dark--not the ordinary blackness of night, but the very darkness there was before the world was made. Crude and atrocious blackness filled the living earth. There was a strange vacancy in the sky; space had lost its center, the person of the sun had vanished like some one who disappears, like a judge who leaves his court. Then these ingrates knew the beauty of Amaterasu. How they searched in the drear air! A great sigh ran through all the islands,--the agony of penitence, the abomination of fear. As in the evening the mosquitoes in myriads fill the stagnant air, the earth was delivered to the brigandage of demons, and of the dead whom one could recognize by this sign: that they had no navels. As a pilot covers his nearest lights, the better to see into the distance; so, by the suppression of this central lamp, space widened around them. And, from a part of the horizon unseen before, they saw a strange whiteness beyond the sky, like the frontier of a neighboring world: the reflection of another sun.

Then all the gods and goddesses, the familiar spirits of the earth, which assist Man and are his companions like horses and oxen,--all were moved by the miserable cries of the hairless creatures, like the barking of little dogs; and they all assembled at the mouth of the river Yokigawa, spirits both of the sea and of the air,--like herds of buffalo, like schools of herring, like flocks of starlings. There the virgin Amaterasu was hidden in a cave in the earth, like a honeycomb in the hollow of a tree, like a treasure in a jug.

“A lamp is not extinguished except by a more brilliant light,” they said. “Amaterasu is there! We do not see her, but we know that she has not left us. Her glory has not suffered diminution. She is hidden in the earth like a cricket, like an ascetic in the retreat of his own thoughts. How shall we make her come out? What appeal can we make to her, and what can we offer her that will be as beautiful as she?”

Then from a stone fallen from heaven they made a mirror, very pure, completely round. They tore down a pine-tree and swathed it in garments of gold and scarlet, like a doll. They adorned it like a woman, and they put the mirror upon it for a face. And they placed this sacred _gohei_ exactly in front of the cavern, which contained the indignant soul of light.

What voice could they choose powerful enough to pierce the earth, to say, “Amaterasu, I am here! I am here, and I know that you are here also! Show yourself to me, oh vision of my eyes! Oh Life, come out of the sepulcher!” The familiar voice, the first voice that she hears when she passes the horizon of human life: the cock calling from the farms on every side at the first crimson streak of dawn,--his is the cry of light itself, the trumpet that no obscurity can stifle! Night or day, indifferent to the visible presence of his goddess or to her withdrawal, indefatigably he carries on his fanfare, with precision he articulates his faith. So before the buried Amaterasu they led the great white bird. And he crowed. And, having crowed, he crowed again.

Then, as if they could not fail to respond to his summons, all the noises of life awoke: the murmur of the day; active, interminable speech; the sound of thousands thronging the hours; the vibrating word whose rhythm is meted out by the bonze with his mallet of wood in the depth of his temple. All these sounded at once,--all the gods, responding to their names. They were very timid, very faint. However Amaterasu in the earth heard them, and was astonished.

And here one must insert the image of Uzumé, just as, in the little popular books, her picture interrupts the black shower of letters. She had invented all this, the dear goddess. She had concocted this wonderful strategy. And now she danced intrepidly on the stretched skin of her drum, frantic with hope; and all that she could find to lure out the sun was a poor little song invented for children: _Hito futa miyo...._

_Hito futa miyo
Itsu muyu nana
Yokokono tari
Momochi yorodzu_,

as one might say: _One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand!_--and as if one said also: _All of you, look at the door! Her Majesty has appeared. Hurrah! Our hearts are filled with happiness._

Then in the fury of the dance she untied her belt, she threw it impatiently aside; and, with draperies flowing, laughing and crying, she stamped and bounded on the elastic and resonant skin which she struck sharply with her feet. And, when they saw her robust and buxom form like that of a little girl, relief came into the hearts of all and they began to laugh. _The sun is no longer in the sky, and still there are not lamentations, but laughter?_ Amaterasu heard them, and her heart was filled with chagrin. Unable to conquer her curiosity, she softly opened the door of the cavern: “_Why are you laughing?_”

A great ray swept across the assembled gods; it leaped the border of the earth; it illumined the moon in the empty sky. Suddenly the Day-Star flamed in the lifeless heavens. As an overripe fruit bursts, behold!--the blind earth could no longer contain the jealous eye, the burning fire of curiosity placed in its center, the woman who is the sun! “Why are you laughing?”--“Oh Amaterasu!” said Uzumé.

And all the gods in unison cried, “Oh Amaterasu!” prostrating themselves.

“Oh Amaterasu, you were not with us; you thought you had withdrawn your face from us; but look, here is some one more beautiful than you are! _Look!_” she said, showing the _gohei_, showing the sacred mirror which, concentrating the flame, produced an insupportable brilliance. “_Look!_”

She saw; and, jealous, raptured, astonished, fascinated, she took one step out of the cavern; and instantly the night was gone!

All the great worlds, that turn about the sun as an eagle circles his prey, were astonished to see the day shining in such an unaccustomed place and the little earth all devoured with glory, like a chandelier which disappears in its own light.

She took one step out of the cavern, and immediately the strongest of the gods leaped forward to close the door behind her. Before her image, surrounded by seven rainbows,--adorable spirit, living fire, from which, with the divine face, emerged only two hands, two pink feet, and the curls of her hair,--so young, so formidable stood this brilliant and essential soul! And, like the swallow which lifts itself in larger and larger circles above the sparkling fields, so Amaterasu, reconquered by her own image, mounted toward her celestial throne. And Time began again with its first day!

At the doorway of the Shinto temples, by means of a cord of straw, the earth still guards against the disappearance of its light; and, in the last recess of the bare sanctuary, they hide, instead of the Eleusinian fire, a little round mirror of polished metal.

A VISIT

There are long cries before any one opens,--furious batterings upon the patient portal,--before the servant, grown conscious of this “concert,” comes to recognize the stranger deposited on a litter in the midst of his porters, before the door. For here there is no deep-sounding bell, no button which, by the pulling of a wire attached through the walls to secret mechanism, sets off a sudden explosion, like the squeal of a beast that one pinches. The Black Mountain is the quarter where the old families live, and the silence is profound. The space that Europeans would reserve for recreation and games, the Chinese consecrate to retreat. In this animal honeycomb, between these streets seething with an unclean humanity, they reserve wide unused spaces,--empty enclosures that are the inheritance of some distinguished person, and that cloister his household gods. Only a noble roof can possess the enormous shade of these banyans older than the city, and of these vines which droop under the weight of their purple globes.

I have entered. I am waiting all alone in the little parlor. It is four o’clock, and the rain has ceased,--or is it still raining? The earth has received its fill of water; the soaked leaves breathe freely. As for me, under this somber and friendly sky I know the compunction and peace which one feels after having wept. Facing me is a wall with an uneven coping, where three square windows open, each crossed with porcelain bars imitating bamboo. As they adjust a “grille” over diplomatic papers, which isolates the important words, so they have applied this screen of triple openings to the wide countryside of trees and water, and have reduced it to a single theme repeated as in a triptych. The frame defines the picture; the bars, which let my sight pass, exclude me, and, better than a closed and bolted door, make certain that I remain inside.

My host does not arrive. I am alone.

THE RICE

It is our very teeth that we sink in the earth, in this plow that we plant there; and even now our bread eats there as we shall eat. At home, in the cold north, it is the sun who kneads our bread; he ripens the field as the open fire cooks our pancakes and roasts our meat. With a strong plowshare we open a furrow in the solid earth where that crust of bread is formed which we cut with our knife and grind between our teeth.

But here the sun does not serve only to heat the domestic sky like a furnace full of coals. One must take precautions with it. When the year commences, the waters overflow. These vast fields without slopes, scarcely separated from the sea that they continue, that the rain soaks without ever draining away, take refuge under the sheet of water in which the peasants fix a thousand rice-frames. The work of the village is to enrich the mud by means of many buckets; on all fours the farmer strokes the mud and dilutes it with his hands. The Mongol does not nibble bread, he snatches it with his lips, he gulps it down, without fashioning a semi-liquid aliment of it in his mouth. So the rice grows, as it is cooked, in steam; and the intention of its people is to furnish all the water it will need to sustain the heat of the celestial furnace. Also, when the waters rise, the chain-pumps sing like crickets everywhere; and they do not have recourse to the buffalo. Side by side, clinging to the same bar and pressing the red handle with knees in unison, men and women watch the kitchen of their field as a housewife watches a smoking dinner. And the Annamite carries the water in a sort of spoon; in his black soutane, with his little tortoise head, as yellow as mustard, he is the weary sacristan of the mire. How many reverences and genuflections there are when, with a bucket fastened to two cords, the pair of _nhaques_ go seeking in all the hollows for juicy mud with which to anoint the earth and make it good to eat.

THE PERIOD

I stop. There is a period to my walk as to a phrase that is finished. It is the title of a tomb at my feet, at this turning where the road descends. From there I take my last view of the earth. I survey the country of the dead. With its groups of pines and olive trees, it spreads out between the deep fields that enclose it. Everywhere there is consummate plenty: Ceres has embraced Persephone. Inescapably this marks the ultimate. I recognize at the foot of these unchangeable mountains the wide line of the river. I define our frontier, I accept it. My exile is symbolized by this island crowded with the dead, devoured by its harvests. Standing alone amid a buried people, my feet among the names spoken by the grass, I watch this cleft in the mountains, through which the soft wind, like a growling dog, has tried for two days to force the enormous cloud it has drawn from the waters behind me.

It is done; the day is completely gone. There is nothing left but to return, traversing again the road that leads me to the house. At this halt, where rest the carriers of coffins and buckets, I look behind me for a long time at the yellow road where the living fare with the dead, which ends like a red period upon the crowded sky.

THE TOAST TO A FUTURE DAY

I have climbed to the highest point of the mountain to drink a toast to a future day,--to a new day, to one that will come,--perhaps it will succeed this very night. _To the highest point of the mountain, in this cup of ice that it lifts to the very lips of Aurora!_ I have stripped and rushed into it. It is so full that, when I enter, the water overflows like a cataract. I dance in the ebullition of the source like a grape-seed in a glass of champagne. I cannot distinguish this gushing basin in which I splash from the whirlpool of air separated from me by a narrow brink. Far below me circles the clamorous eagle. Beautiful Aurora, like a shaft thou art sped here from the sea below among the islands! Drink! that I may feel the quivering of thy insatiate lip as deep as the submerged plants to which I sink. Let the sun rise! that I may see the light shadow of my suspended body painted beneath me on the sand of this basin ringed with the seven-colored rainbow.

THE DAY OF THE FEAST OF ALL THE RIVERS