THE TOMB
On the pediment of the funereal portal I read an order to alight. On my right are some broken statues in the reeds, and an inscription on a formidable pillar of black granite gives with wearisome detail the laws relating to sepulchers; half obliterated by moss a threat forbids the breaking of vases, loud cries, or the spoiling of ceremonial basins.
It is certainly later than two o’clock, because I see that the dim, round sun is already a third of the way down a dull and lurid sky. I can only mount straight onward, to survey the arrangement of the cemetery; and, preparing my heart, I start out on the road the funerals follow across this home of the dead, in itself lifeless. First come, one after another, two square mountains of brick. Their hollow centers open by four arches on the four points of the compass. The first of these halls is empty. In the second a giant tortoise of marble, so high that I can scarcely reach his mustached head with my hand, supports a panegyric column.“This is the porch and apprenticeship of the earth,” I thought. “Here Death halted between the double thresholds, and here the master of the world received supreme homage between the four horizons and the sky.”
But scarcely have I gone out by the Northern door (it is not vainly that I leap this rivulet!) than I see open out before me the country of the shades.
Forming an avenue of alternate couples, monstrous animals appear before me, facing each other, successively repeated kneeling and standing in pairs; rams, horses, unicorns, camels, elephants; until, at the turning where the last of the procession disappears, these enormous and ugly shapes loom out against the straggling grass. Further off are ranged civil and military mandarins. These stones are sent to ceremonial funerals in the place of animals and men; and, as the dead have crossed the threshold of life, it would not be suitable to give closer likenesses to such replicas.
Here, where this large cairn—hiding, they say, the treasures and bones of a very ancient dynasty—ceases to bar the passage, the way turns toward the East. I am walking now among soldiers and ministers. Some are intact and standing, otherslie on their faces. One warrior without a head still clasps the hilt of a sword in his fist. By a triple-arched bridge the path crosses the second canal.
Now, by a series of stairs where the central hand-rail still shows the imperial dragon, I cross the ravaged site of terraces and courts. These are the walks of Memory, the fugitive traces of lives which, leaving the earth, serve only to enrich it by decay; the steps of sacrifices, the awful garden where what is destroyed attests its whilom existence in the presence of what still remains. In the center a throne supports, a baldachin still shelters, the inscription of a dynasty. All about, temples and guest-houses have become a confused rubbish among the briars.
And the tomb is before me.
Between massive projections of the square bastions which flank it, behind the deep-cut channel of the third stream, is a wall which assures us that the end of our journey must be here. A wall and nothing but a wall, a hundred feet high and two hundred feet wide. Eroded by the use of centuries, the inexorable barrier presents a blind face of masonry. A single round hole shows in the center of the base, the mouth of an oven or the oubliette of a dungeon. Thiswall forms the front of a sort of trapezoid formation, detached from the mountain which overhangs it. A low molding, ending beneath an overhanging cornice, stands out from the wall like a console. No corpse is so suspect as to require such a mass being placed upon him. This is the throne of Death itself, the regal exaltation of sepulture.
A straight alley, remounting the sloping plain, crosses a level plateau. At the end there is only the same mountain whose steep slope conceals in its depths the ancient Ming.
And I understand that this is the sepulcher of the Atheist. Time has scattered the vain temples and laid the idols in the dust, and only the arrangement of the place remains, with the idea it expressed. The pompous catafalques on the threshold have not been able to retain the dead. The cortège of his vanished glory cannot retard him. He crosses the three rivers, he traverses the manifold courts filled with incense; nor is the monument that has been prepared for him sufficient to hold him. He cleaves his way further, and enters into the very body and bones of primitive earth. It is merely an animal interment, the mixing of crude flesh withinert and compact clay. The king and peasant are forever consolidated into this death without a dream or an awakening.
But the shadow of evening spreads over this cruel place. Oh ruins, the tomb has survived you! And the brutal stolidity of this bulk is a perfect symbol of death itself.
As I return among the colossal statues of stone, I see in the dried grass the decaying corpse of a horse, which a dog is tearing. The beast looks at me as he licks the blood which trickles down his chops; then, applying his paws again to the red carcass, he tears off a long strip of flesh. The mangled remains are spread about.