Suddenly his face brightened, and when all thought he was about to condemn the presumptuous madman to most exquisite tortures, he smiled upon Wu Taotsz, and spoke:
“Is it conceivable that in all these years we have not learned to honour lovely Peace with other than a fortress for her habitation? Mine eyes are dim with dreams of things I cannot shape—gold walls, and tumbling waters, and shining birds, and the misty loom of turrets clouding a vast space. Can Imagination build me such a shrine for Peace?”
“Aye, and more than thou dreamest,” answered the painter.
Shun-yuen rose. He bade the attendants honour Wu Taotsz, and minister to him, and give him all that he needed.
“Only the bare wall of a quiet room, and much rice-water, and my paints and brushes,” said the stranger, his eyes gleaming.
And he was allotted such a room as he desired; and, by his wish, none, not even the Emperor, came near him while he wrought. But every day Shun-yuen looked from his Palace windows upon the surrounding emptiness, and wondered when he was to see arise there the first evidences of the glorious fabric which Wu Taotsz was to build for him of his Imagination. And still every morning his soul was unsatisfied and the waste glared desolate.
Now in the meantime speculation was rife as to the stranger and his genesis. Some believed him to be a wizard embryo hatched from the sands of the great river; others that he was the spirit of the kilns where they baked the earth Kaolin into the porcelain which, in its hues and forms of increasing beauty, was coming to express more and more day by day the creative genius of the age. But of all these surmises Wu Taotsz was unconscious, as he worked on alone in his empty room.
And at last one morning he sent for the Emperor.
Eagerly Shun-yuen, dispensing, for the first time in his life, with forms and punctilio, hurried to obey the summons, and entered the room alone. And instantly he uttered a cry of rapture, and stood like one half stupefied. For there before him stood realised the pleasance of his dreams, only a thousand times transfigured.
He was gazing upon the clustered minarets of a palace such as his soul had never conceived, a fabric all builded of cloud and amber and foam, and yet as solid as the sward from which it sprang. There, in the midst of heavenly gardens which receded down terrace on terrace of loveliness to low hills and a blue horizon, the pearly structure sprang into a sky of lazulite; and to the golden gates of the main pavilion a flight of marble steps ascended.