Perhaps it will bring me luck, who knows?
It is a very sacred well.
Or perhaps, when it is quite dark, someone who is
hungry….
Then the luck will be his!
The Village of the Mud Idols
The Abandoned God
In the cold darkness of eternity he sits, this god who
has grown old.
His rounded eyes are open on the whir of time, but
man who made him has forgotten him.
Blue is his graven face, and silver-blue his hands. His
eyebrows and his silken beard are scarlet as the
hope that built him.
The yellow dragon on his rotting robes still rears itself
majestically, but thread by thread time eats its
scales away,
And man who made him has forgotten him.
For incense now he breathes the homely smell of rice and tea, stored in his anteroom; For priests the busy spiders hang festoons between his fingers, and nest them in his yellow nails. And darkness broods upon him. The veil that hid the awful face of godhead from the too impetuous gaze of worshippers serves in decay to hide from deity the living face of man, So god no longer sees his maker.
Let us drop the curtain and be gone!
I am old too, here in eternity.
Pa-tze-kiao
The Bridge
The Bridge of the Eight Scholars spans the canal narrowly.
On the gray stone of its arch are carvings in low relief,
and the curve of its span is pleasing to the eye.
No one knows how old is the Bridge of the Eight
Scholars.