Homer Lea

“ The street of the Sombre Heavens leaving the city through the Great Southern Gate debouches almost into the middle of it, at which place it has the appearance of a narrow field, so wide is it, and so dense and multitudinous are the suburbs that crouch beneath the old south walls of Yingching, with its towers and frown of a thousand years.
Just across the river, with its myriads of quarrelling boats, is the Monastery of Wa-lam-tze, where five hundred monks with their fowls doze and blink in alcoved groves or in halls that are of marble. ”

“ For some moments the Breton stood by the winding stairs of the Water Tower, then walked hastily south, winding, turning, doubling, twisting through a maze of narrow alleys until he came to the Street of Pearls. Once on this thoroughfare he hastened on until he came near to where the street ended at the granite Gate of Tai Lin’s park. Without hesitation he turned into an open guardhouse recessed on the right of the street and leaning against one of the pillars fixed his gaze upon the gateway, as immovable as the pillar itself—which was of stone. ”

“ If any show duplicity or fail to exert themselves, let them die beneath ten thousand knives.”
Such is the Tien Tu Hin, the Association of Heaven and Earth: enormous, unseen; filled with terror and serenity; vast, invisible; its labyrinths endless as are the veins of the earth, and like the earth’s depths, asurge with molten lava; calm, portentous, peaceful, terrible; born to avenge a crime; fostered to destroy a dynasty; matured to establish Universal Peace.
By the hand of thoughtful Fate the Breton was led into its labyrinths and became part of it and of its terror. ”

“ The men that live on the Bay of Tai Wan have no settled occupation. They are farmers when the time comes to sow rice and to harvest it; they are fishermen, who know the bed of the sea; smugglers in their peaceful moods, but pirates always, and months are few when their mountains do not resound with the noise of combat; when the brown surge of the bay is without loitering spars, or dead or wreckage. ”

“ This is the River of Tears, dark in sunlight, melancholy and sullen at dusk, and at midnight a dark flood that mourns. There is an immense terribleness about it and its sorrow; robbing, feeding, contemplating, nursing, and in due time devouring the innumerable millions it has reared. The giving of man to this River of his tears and his dead has been without end, as long as they have dwelt on its banks it has been so, yet they conceal this fact from themselves by calling its dark flood the River of Pearls, by giving gods to its depths; to its banks, temples and pagodas. ”

“ And whomever a Chinese pirate admires men should stand in awe of or look upon him as a child.
The Breton went about his duties without cessation except at dusk, and then, when those about him had ceased their labours, he would seek the solitude of the sea-bank as he had that of the river. It is doubtful if he perceived that instead of the great city with its lessening but varied noises there were behind him mountains down whose desolate sides came gloom instead of twilight, while the only sounds that rose from them were the bark of jackal and scream of night-bird. ”

“ In northern latitudes such mornings are often called the smile of spring, but in this land they are more than the birth from winter’s womb—they are an awakening on the bosom of summer and there pervades abroad an inexpressible atmosphere of compassion. On such mornings it is said that the tiger comes forth from his lair and in the sunned jungle glade lounges heedless of his quarry, so that neither men nor the most timid of jungle deer have fear of him, for the peace of the day has gone into his terrible heart and he purrs and purrs and purrs like a kitten on a woman’s lap. ”

“ This monster of nature is born somewhere out of the huge womb of the South Pacific, upon whose bosom it strays aimlessly and recklessly about, romping, wrestling, growing, until it gets into a 18temper and buffets its mother, the sea. Becoming cyclopean, it spits at heaven—petulant it departs.
Like a loosened monster it allows itself every liberty, and wanders with the greatest ease in any path. It sucks up the sea and snatches lightning from the clouds; it fills its belly with floods and its breast with fire. Headlong it falls upon every obstacle; ships become as dust motes in its breath. ”

“ Here and there over the estuary of the Chu Kiang in the midst of their paddy-fields and orchards, lay walled towns and villages, half hidden under banians, while on the distant river bank, directly opposite the two men, the Lob pagodas point skyward, like great fingers, and on their left the pagodas of Wampoa and the Golden Lotus pierce the sky.
It was the peace, the dumb, inanimate peace of this scene that alarmed the older man. The river, usually teeming with a vast number and diversity of craft, was deserted other than now and then when a boat crept furtively along its southern bank. ”

“ But now, as a bubble in the sunlight iridescent with a myriad hues, he drifted along, his happiness modified and yet illumined by the melancholy of a race that has known so little of sunshine and so much of Breton gloom. In this park there was not a flower but whose brightness was reflected within him; every nodding blade of grass, the water-fowls’ gay plumage, the heavens, the mist clouds adrift like himself in the tranquil air; the double brightness of sun in sky and stream. ”

“ The Breton neither answered nor turned his eyes away.
“Priest, shall I come out?”
126He still looked up into the crevices.
“Shall I?”
A questioning light came into his eyes.
“Would it make you happy?” she whispered.
The light deepened.
“Well, I don’t!” she exclaimed scornfully. “At its best it is nothing; in its truth it is false. Such hopes men lay to gold and rubies in their mountain caskets: to the cloudy pearl in the jade depths of the sea. Sought; found; lost; forgotten; its gold, cloud—gold and its pearl moon-mist! How ridiculous!” ”

“ Thrones, pedestals, dais and couches draped lightly in gleaming folds, coruscating as though studded with all the jewels of Yu Ngao. In this cavern joyousness and laughter echoed.
The wife, like an uncaged lark of an hundred spirits, was Happiness itself; and when laughter was not on her lips her song found its way through the columned depths. To her birdlike notes, numberless echoes blended in perfect harmony as though some subterranean chorus had taken up her song and was sending it through the uttermost caverns as she had sent it into the hearts of men. ”

“ But as they hurried along the black street a sound like a cough fell upon their ears, distant, piteous, wind-torn. They listened, and what they heard was terrible—the muttering of a typhoon.
Perhaps if the howl of a hell were known, the muttering of the typhoon, though dulled by distance, might be compared to it. As the Great Wind approaches this muttering grows louder and louder until it becomes a gigantic gibber; when at hand, the heavens are filled with multitudinous screams, howls, laughter, moans, and shrieks—a stir of sounds that is frightful. ”

“ From a boat by night this exit of the Water-gate looks like a monstrous maw, and the portcullis outlined by the lights of the suburbs appear as its jagged, gigantic teeth. And these teeth Tsang and the boatman saw move above them and heard their grind. But under the bamboo canopy there were still smiles, smiles by no means lost in 235the blackness. These two were blissful under the very crunch of Fate’s teeth. As the boat glided forward under the impulse of its own momentum they were unconscious of a great splash just behind them and cries that the gate was down. ”

“ AND SO IT ENDED After passing under the waterfall curtaining the doorway of the Grotto of the Sleepless Dragon, one apparently stands upon the edge of an abyss out of which come blasts of cold moist air and a stillness, which, in contrast to the splashing roar of the cataract, is appalling. The floor of the cavern slopes downward some ten degrees, and in the subdued rays filtered through the prisms of falling waters the nearby walls with their columns and pilasters cleave imperceptibly out of the dim light, white as the clearest marble. ”

“ As the Deluge burst through the labyrinthine windings of the suburbs in their race with death, the old men and those that were feeble, panting, and wheezing, dropped out, but new recruits took their places and the flood was swollen as it rushed along, so that before the head debouched into the Street of the Sombre Heavens, the rear could no longer hear the battle-cry of the van falling sonorous and terrible upon the silence of twilight. ”

“ The seas are awash with derelicts of different kinds. Some, in due time, like the hulks of the old East Indiamen, become thrifty, incrustating themselves with spray gusts of silver, and furring themselves with the fur of their drift; a wealth clings to them and they become stranded by riches. They are found imbedded in all Oriental ports, and while they have formed a new environment, they still remain conspicuous.
Again these seas are adrift with derelicts that would succour; as when men float on the sea in an open boat suddenly behold with immeasurable joy a speck in the distance. ”

“ This slab-worn road, after it leaves the suburbs clustering around the East Gate of Yingching, follows right-obliquely across the rice-fields to the foot of the White Cloud Hills.
To the residents of Yingching these hills have always been a source of delight, and for uncounted ages multitudes have crowded at sunset the towers and pavilions of the city walls to watch their glens and slopes become veiled in a filtering of delicate shades—lilac, amethyst and violet, until, through a deep of purple, they vanish into night—a fluttering of gorgeous shadows. ”

“ The word holds no more wonderful scene than when after having ascended a fjord that opens into the North River, and upon whose jade-green waters the sun shines but a moment each day, a turn is made and this marvellous white precipice rises overhead sheer out of the water. Four caves are to be seen half-veiled with vines and from out of a great fissure a third way up the cliff falls a cataract in a broad, heavy sheet of glittering silver. When it strikes against the rocks, it then comes down like snow or is blown upward a veiling mist. ”

“ She looked at him again, and out over the bund echoed a cry so full of joy that the falling night seemed turned into the break of day, and the lark’s note quivered in the air. Some men in the multitude smiled foolishly and wiped away a tear, others laughed to choke a sob.
The Breton picked up the beheading sword at his feet, handling it as lightly as a knife. Without haste, seemingly oblivious to all about him, he cut the cords from her wrists. No one moved. They watched, fascinated, the great sword play delicately about her ”

“ These terrible vortices are never still and never without their debris. London is such a maelstrom, so is Paris, so is New York.
The world also has its colossal eddy, but they that drift upon the world’s currents are derelicts, not debris; it is true both are wreckage, but there is a wide difference between them. Debris is scum; derelicts are wrecks. Scum from scum arises; derelicts may be the wrecks of greatness. Debris is unnamed; the House of Orleans is a derelict, and its princes have died by the wash of the China Sea. ”

“ With the setting of the sun came the gorgeous afterglow of this latitude, burning the cloud banks above the purple-misted mountains with gold, alternating with amethyst and lilac and shafting over this solitude their exquisite hues and lavishing them unseen upon the man pressed against the cliff. At last a purple veil rose from the gorge: eagles and companies of ospreys soaring majestically above and below him now began to wheel, scream, poise, and dart. The spirit-cat and hundred-footed fox came to look at him, meditatively, fearlessly, knowingly, for it was dusk. ”

“ We grant the one woman to be the perfect rose or lily; man ambling through the garden of womankind spies this choicest flower and plucks it—which is marriage—then for his temerity wanders the rest of life through this endless blooming garden with an herb whose hues are soon no hues, whose perfume has become an odour, and its sweets so galled that the very bees forsake it and hornets extract substance from it for their stings. ”

“ Heedlessly the Breton heard the stamp of her foot and contentedly waited, though no sound was heard but its restless, impatient tapping.
“Why did you go away?”
“I buried a man——”
“Did that take you all these weeks?”
“No—but——”
“Priest!” she interrupted impatiently, “don’t give me excuses! Those veiling rags under which men hide their scared swarm of sins! Bah!”
He looked happily expectant at the crevices just over his head.
“Oh, well, it is immaterial,” she continued coldly, carelessly; “you are only my instructor. Come and go when you please. I have sought your learning, not you.” ”

“ He moaned and brought a pallor to the cheeks of the priest. He sighed and the pain of it was indescribable.
151Presently he began to breathe hoarsely, then mumbling, speaking—the speech of his wild life. One moment in combat with Malay praus; hurtling through the water; repelling boarders; cursing, exultant, frenzied and the swish of the kris was in the air. Then followed commands, as when the typhoon is on sea, and in his quivering tones was the echo of the wind’s scream. Fights in the jungle—soft, creeping, peering, throttling. ”