THE CITY AT NIGHT
It is raining softly. The night has come. The policeman takes the lead and turns to the left, ceasing his talk of the time when, as a kitchen-boy in the invading army, he saw his Major installed in the sanctuary of the “God of Long Life.” The road that we follow is mysterious. By a series of alleys, of passages, stairs, and doorways, we come out in the court of the temple, where buildings with clawlike copings and hornlike peaks make a black frame to the night sky. A smoldering fire flickers from the dark doorway. We penetrate the blackness of the hall.
The cave is filled with incense, glowing with red light. One cannot see the ceiling. A wooden grille separates the idol from his clients, and from the table of offerings, where garlands of fruit and bowls of food are deposited. The bearded face of a giant image can be vaguely distinguished. The priests are dining, seated about a round table. Against the wall is a drum as enormous as a tun, and a great gong in the form of the ace of spades. Two red tapers, likesquare columns, lose themselves in the smoke and the night, where vague pennants float.
Onward!
The narrow tangle of streets, where we are involved in the midst of a shadowy crowd, is lit only by the deep open booths which border it. These are the work-rooms of carpenters, engravers; the shops of tailors, shoemakers, and venders of fur. From innumerable kitchens, behind the display of bowls of noodles and soup, the sound of frying escapes. In a dark recess some woman attends a crying child. Among stacked-up coffins is the gleam of a pipe. A lamp, a sidewise flicker, shows strange medleys. At the street corners, at the bends of heavy little stone bridges, in niches behind iron bars, dwarfish idols can be seen between two red candles. After a long progress under the rain, in the darkness and filth, we find ourselves suddenly in a yellow blind alley which a big lantern lights with a brutal flare. Color of blood, color of pestilence, the high walls of the dungeon where we are have been daubed with an ocher so red that it seems of itself to irradiate light. The door at our left is simply a round hole.
We reach a court. Here is another temple. It is a shadowy hall from whichexudes an odor of earth. It is enriched with idols, which, disposed in two rows around three sides of the place, brandish swords, lutes, roses, and branches of coral. They tell us that these are the years of human life. While I try to find the twenty-seventh, I am left behind; and, before leaving, the fancy takes me to look into a niche that I find on the further side of the door. A brown demon with four pairs of arms, his face convulsed by rage, is hidden there like an assassin.
Forward! The roads become more and more miserable. We go past high palisades of bamboo; and at last, emerging from the southern gate, we turn toward the east. The road follows the base of a high crenellated wall. On the other hand sink the deep trenches of a dried river-bed. Below we see sampans lit by cooking fires. A shadowy people swarm there like the spirits of the Inferno.
And undoubtedly this lamentable river-bank marks the end planned for our exploration, because we retrace our steps. City of Lanterns, we gaze again upon the chaos of thy ten thousand faces!
Seeking an explanation, a reason why this town where we loitered is so distinct in our memories, we are struck at oncewith this fact: there are no horses in the streets. The city is entirely of human beings. It seems an article of faith with the Chinese not to employ an animal or a machine for work by which a man may live. This explains the narrowness of the streets, the stairs, the curved bridges, the houses without fences, the sinuous windings of the alleys and passages. The city forms a coherent whole, an industrious honeycomb communicating in all its parts, perforated like an ant-hill. When the night comes, every one barricades himself. During the day there are no doors, that is to say no doors that close. The door here has no official function. It is simply an opening. Not a wall but can by some fissure give passage to an agile and slender person. The large streets necessary to general traffic, and to an ordered mechanical life, would be of no use here. Here merely collective alleys and passages are provided.
An opium den, a market of prostitutes, these last fill the framework of my memory. The smoking den is a vast nave, empty all the height of two stories which superimpose their balconies inside. The building is full of blue smoke, one breathes an odor of burning chestnuts. It is a heavy perfume, powerful, stagnant, strong as the beatof a gong. Sepulchral smoke, it establishes between our air and dreams a middle atmosphere which the seeker of these mysteries inhales. One sees across the haze the fire of little opium lamps like the souls of the smokers. Later they will arrive in greater numbers. Now it is too early.
On narrow benches, their heads helmed with flowers and pearls, clothed in wide blouses of silk and full embroidered trousers, motionless, with their hands on their knees, the prostitutes wait in the street like beasts at a fair, in the pell-mell and the dust of passers-by. Beside their mothers and dressed like them, also motionless, little girls are seated on the same bench. Behind, a flare of petrol lights the opening to the stairway.
I go. And I carry the memory of a life congested, naïve, restless; of a city at the same time open and crowded, a single house with a multifold family. I have seen the city of other days, when, free of modern influences, men swarmed in an artless disorder; in fact it is the fascination of all the past that I am leaving, when, issuing out of the double gate in the hurly-burly of wheelbarrows and litters, in the midst of lepers and epileptics, I see the electric lights of the Concession shine.