THE HALT ON THE CANAL
Now,—passing the place where old men and women congregate, driven from their far-off villages by the need of food, and traveling on rafts made of their house-doors, guided by the domestic duck,—encountering waters which seem as if they were flooded with rice, that they may fitly enter into a region of opulence; pushing across this large and rectilinear canal which bounds the rude high wall enclosing the city and its people, where the exaggerated arch of a bridge frames with evening the crenelated tower of a gate opening on the dark countryside; by the wharf we tie up our boat among square stone tombs in the grass, the crude material of epitaphs.
With day our investigation begins. We become entangled in a maze of Chinese streets, murky and moist with domestic odors. For a long time we follow the narrow footpath in the turmoil of the market-place, in the midst of a people mixed in with their dwellings as bees are with their wax and honey. I recall a little girl winding a skein of green silk, a barber cleaning theear of his client with a fine pincer like the antennæ of a crawfish; a little donkey turning a millstone near an oil warehouse, the dark quiet of a pharmacy within whose depths, through the gilded frame of a moon-shaped door, two red candles flame before the name of the apothecary. We traverse many courts, more than a hundred bridges.
Winding through narrow alleys bordered by great sepia-colored walls, we reach the richer quarter. If these closed doors should open to us, they would show vestibules flagged with stone, a reception hall with its large bed-table, a little peach-tree flowering in a pot, and smoky passages whose rafters are hung with hams and bundles. Hidden behind this wall, in a little court we find a monster of a wisteria plant. Its hundred creepers interlace, interweave, tie themselves in knots, and twine into a kind of manifold, tortuous cable, which, thrusting out its woody, serpentine length on all sides, spreads over the trellis, hiding its trench in a thick sky of mauve clusters. Let us traverse the ruins of this long suburb where naked men are weaving silk in the débris. We shall gain a deserted space which occupies the south side of the enclosure.
Here, they say, was formerly the imperial residence; and in fact the triple grating and quadruple framework of the consecutive doors bar, with their granite outlines, the wide flagged road on which we walk. The enclosure contains nothing but rank herbage; and,—at the place where the “Four Ways” meet, which diverge toward the four cardinal points under triumphal arches,—with an inscription like a map displayed to the whole Kingdom, the imperial stele, defaced by the fissures in its marble, slants on the decapitated tortoise which is its base.
The Chinese show everywhere representations of that inherent emptiness whose necessity they emphasize. “Let us honor,” says theTao teh King, “Vacuity, which gives to the wheel its utility and to the lute its harmony!” These ruins and these fallow tracts which are found in the same enclosure close to the densest multitudes, these sterile mountains shouldering the most meticulous culture, and the wide expanse of the cemeteries, do not impress the mind with a false idea; for, in the density and mass of this coherent people, administration and justice, religion and monarchy, disclose by contrasts no less strange the same yawning vacancy of vain phantoms and ruins.
China is not, like Europe, elaborated into compartments. No boundaries, no special statutes, oppose any resistance throughout her immense area to the spread of her surging humanity. That is why, powerless as is the sea to foresee its agitations, this nation which can only be saved from destruction by its plasticity, shows everywhere, like Nature itself, an antique and provisory aspect,—unstable, full of hazards, possibilities, and deficiencies. The present always contains the influences of the past and the future. Man has not made an absolute conquest of the soil, a final and methodical arrangement. The multitude still graze upon grass.
Suddenly a lugubrious cry overwhelms us! The guardian of the enclosure, at the foot of one of the gates designed like an upright letter which frame the field, sounds on the long Chinese trumpet; and we see the horn of thin brass quiver under the force of the sound which fills it. Raucous and rumbling, if he declines the trumpet toward the earth; and strident if he lifts it; without inflection and without cadences, the dreary blaring noise culminates in the reverberance of a frightful uproar,—do fa, do fa! The harsh call of a peacock would not startle more thedrowsiness of this abandoned garden. It is the horn of the shepherd, and not the bugle, which speaks and commands. This is not the singing trumpet which leads armies on,—it is the collective voice of beasts; and the herd or the flocks confusedly assemble at its sound. But we are alone; and for nothing living does the Mongol trumpet at this mysterious crossing of the Ways.
When we return to our boat, it is almost night. At sunset, all down the horizon the clouds seem tinted with blue, and on the dim earth the fields ofcolzasshine like blows of light.