and the semi-circle of stone, completed by the brace, surrounds the
dead person, who makes a mount in the center like a sleeper under his
coverings. It is thus that the earth, opening her arms, makes him her
own and consecrates him to herself. In front is placed the tablet
inscribed with the titles and names; because the Chinese believe that
certain portions of the soul, that stop to read the name, linger above
the tomb. This tablet forms the reredos of a stone altar on which
are deposited the symmetrically arranged offerings. In front of this
the tomb, by the formal arrangement of its terraces and balustrades,
welcomes and receives the living family who go there on solemn days to
honor the remains of the deceased ancestor. Primordial and testamentary
hieroglyph! Facing it, the hemi-cycle reverberates the invocation. All
earth which is above the level of mud is occupied by these vast low
tombs, like the openings of pits crammed full. There are little ones,
simple ones and elaborate, some new and others which seem as old as the
rocks where they lean. The most important are high on the mountain, as
if in the folds of its neck. A thousand men together could kneel in
this tomb.
I myself live in this country of sepulchers, and by a different road I
regain my house on the summit of the hill.
The town is below on the other side of the wide yellow river Min,
which precipitates its deep and violent waters between the arches of
the Bridge of Ten Thousand Ages. During the day one can see, like the
copings of the tombs, the rampart of jagged mountains that enclose the
city. The flying pigeons and the tower in the middle of a pagoda make
one feel the immensity of this distance. And I can see the two-horned
roofs, two wooded hills rising between the houses, and on the river
a confusion of wooden rafts and junks whose poops are painted with
pictures. But now it is too dark. Scarcely a fire pricks the dusk and
the mist beneath me, and by a road I know, slipping into the funereal
darkness of the pines, I gain my habitual post, this great triple tomb
blackened with moss and age, oxidized like armor, which thrusts its
frowning parapet obliquely into space.
I come here to listen.
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.