GARDENS
It is half-past three: white mourning.[A] The sky is veiled as if with white linen. The air is moist and raw. I go into the city. I am looking for gardens.
I walk in a black gravy. Along the ditch whose crumbling border I follow, the odor is so strong that it is like an explosive. There is the smell of oil, garlic, filth, ashes, opium, and offal. I walk amid a free and easy people who are shod with thick buskins or sandals of straw, wearing long hoods or skullcaps of felt, their silk or linen trousers tucked into leggings.
The wall winds and undulates, and its coping, an arrangement of bricks and open-work tiles, imitates the back and body of a crawling dragon. A sort of head terminates it, from which floats a cloud of smoke. This is the place. I knock mysteriously at a little black door which opens. Under the overhanging roofs I cross a succession of vestibules and narrow corridors. I am in a strange place.
It is a garden of stones.... Like the ancient Italian and French designers, the Chinese have understood that a garden, from the fact of its inclosure, must be complete in itself and harmonious in all its parts. Only so will nature adapt herself to our moods, and only so, by a subtle harmony, will the master feel at home wherever he looks. Just as a landscape does not consist simply of its grass and the color of its foliage, but is distinguished by its outlines and the slope of the ground, so the Chinese literally construct their gardens with stones. They are sculptors instead of painters. Because it is susceptible of elevation and depth, of contours and reliefs, through the variety of its planes and surfaces, stone seems to them a more suitable medium for creating a background for Man than are plants, which they reduce to their normal place of decoration and ornament.
Nature herself has prepared the materials. The hand of Time, the frost, the rain, wear away, work at the rock; perforating it, gashing it, probing it with a searching finger. Faces, animals, skeletons, hands, shells, bodies without heads, petrified wood like a congealed mass of broken figures, mingled with leaves and fishes; Chinese art seizes all these strange objects, imitates them, and arranges them with an ingenious industry.
This garden represents a mountain cleft by a precipice, to which steep paths give access. Its feet bathe in a little lake half covered with green scum, where a zigzag bridge completes the bias outline. Built upon a foundation of pink granite piles, the tea-house mirrors in the greenish black waters of the basin its soaring double roofs, which seem to lift it from the earth like outspread wings.
Below, driven straight into the earth like iron candlesticks, the stripped trees bar the sky, their giant stature dominating the garden. I wander among the stones by a long labyrinth whose windings and turnings, ascents and evasions, amplify and complicate the scene, simulating the mazes of a dream around the lake and the mountain. Finally I attain the kiosk on the summit. The garden seems to sink below me like a valley full of temples and pavilions, and among the trees appears the poem of the roofs.
They are high and low, detached and massed, elongated like a pediment or swelling like a bell. They are surmounted with ornamental friezes decorated with centipedes and fishes. At the intersections of their ridges the peaks display stags, storks, altars, vases, and wingèd pomegranates—all symbolic. The roofs, lifted up at the corners like arms which hold up a too ample robe, have a creamy whiteness or the blackness of soot yellowed and sodden. The air is green, as when one looks through old window-glass.
The other slope brings us before the great pavilion. The descent winds slowly toward the lake by irregular steps leading to other surprises. Coming out of an alley, I see pointing in disorder toward the sky five or six horns of a roof whose building is hidden from me. Nothing could paint the drunken toss of these fairy prows, the proud elegance of these flowering stalks, holding up a lily to the envious clouds. Bourgeoning with this flower, the strong framework lifts itself like a branch that one lets spring.
I reach the border of the pond where the stalks of dead lotus flowers lie across the still waters. The silence is as profound as the depth of a winter forest. This harmonious place was built for the pleasure of the members of a Syndicate of Commerce in beans and rice, who doubtless come here in the spring nights to drink tea and watch the shore glimmer under the moon.
The other garden is more singular.
It was almost night when, penetrating into its square enclosure, I saw it filled to its walls with a vast landscape. Picture a mass of rocks, a chaos, a confusion of overthrown blocks, heaped up together as if by the force of the sea; a vision of madness, a country as ghastly as a brain with its convolutions bared. The Chinese flay their landscapes. Inexplicable as nature, this little corner seems also as vast and as complex. Among these rocks rises a dark and twisted pine-tree. The warped trunk, the color of its bristling tufts, the violent dislocation of its limbs, the disproportion of this single tree with the artificial country which it dominates,—like a dragon issuing from the earth in smoke, combating the wind and the storms,—make this place unreal, render it grotesque and fantastic. Here and there funereal foliage, yews and arbor-vitæ, in their vigorous blackness, intensify this cataclysm. In my amazement I ponder this melancholy document. And in the middle of the enclosure one great rock stands in the dusk of twilight like a monster,—a theme of reverie and enigma.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] White is the color of Chinese mourning.
THE FEAST OF THE DEAD IN THE
SEVENTH MONTH
Ingots of paper are the money of the dead. From thin cards are cut the figures of persons, houses, and animals. The dead man must be followed by these fragile imitations, these patterns of living things; and, if burned, they will accompany him where he goes. The flute guides such souls, the beat of a gong assembles them like bees. In the shadowy darkness, the brilliance of a flame soothes and satisfies them.
Along the bank of the river the prepared barges wait for the night to come. Scarlet tinsel is fastened to the end of a pole; and, whether the river at this turning seems to derive the color of its waters from a leaden sky, or whether it moves its swarming life mysteriously under accumulated clouds,—still the torches flare at the prow, the festoons of lanterns toss from the mast, brightening the gloom with a vivid note,—as a candle held in the hand in a spacious room lightens the solemn emptiness of the night. Meanwhile the signal is given, the flutes shrill out, the gong sounds, firecrackers explode, the three boatmen lean to the long scull. The barge starts and tacks, leaving in the wide sweep of its rudder a trail of fire. Some one is strewing little lamps. Uncertain glimmers on the vast flow of the opaque waters, these flicker a moment and perish. An arm seizes the tinsel streamer, the ball of fire which sinks and flares in the smoke, and touches them to the tomb of the waters; the illusory brightness of the light, like the gleaming of fish, fascinates the cold drowned. Other illuminated barges go and come. Far off are heard detonations, and on the war-ships two bugles, answering one another, sound together the extinguishing of the fires.
The loitering stranger who, from the shore, contemplates the vast night open before him like a chart, will hear the return of the religious barge. The torches are extinguished, the shrill hautboy has died away, but, over a precipitate beating of drumsticks, dominated by a continual rolling of drums, the funereal gong continues its tumult and its dance. Who is it that beats? The sound rises and falls, ends, recommences, and presently swells to a clamor as if impatient hands beat on the metal hung between two worlds. Then solemnly, beneath the measured strokes, the gong returns a deep reverberation. The boat approaches. It passes the river-bank and the fleet of moored craft; and now, in the heavy darkness of the opium barges, it is at my feet. I can see nothing; but the funeral orchestra, which had died away for a long interval, now, after the fashion of dogs that howl, explodes again in the darkness.
This is the feast of the seventh month when the earth enters into its repose. Along the road the rickshaw-runners have stuck in the earth between their feet sticks of incense and little red candle-ends. I must return. Tomorrow I shall come to sit in the same place. It is all over; and still, like the sightless dead sunk beneath an infinity of waves, I hear the tone of the sepulchral sistrum, the clamor of iron drums beaten with terrible blows in the close darkness.