These vines and cavities have become the homes of innumerable birds: doves, thrushes, cormorants and francolins, mimahs, kingfishers, owls, ospreys and eagles, while at dusk the hundred-footed fox and spirit-cat creep about its broken face, in and out of its columns and creepers.
One day these birds fluttered and screamed, the fox and spirit-cat peeped out of their dens for a boat had crept into their solitude and lingered in the emerald lake.
Presently two men got out of it, followed with difficulty the narrow, vine-covered path, crossed the stones and disappeared under the falling waters. All day the birds watched them go back and forth, bearing their loads into the cavern whence no man ever returns.
So the day passed and along toward the latter part of the afternoon one of the men went down to the boat and remained there, smoking peacefully. The other climbed up the face of the cliff until he reached a narrow shelf near the far end of the fissure from which the cataract burst. Bright little birds with blue wings and brown breasts, a-tilting on the vines, francolins perched on the crags or fluttering in circles, looked wonderingly at this man standing silently upon that perilous projection and gazing contentedly over the lower cliffs to the westward.
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.
When the man clinging to the vines and the crags descended the birds returned to their accustomed roosts and night brooded gently over all.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE PROPITIATION OF THE GODS OF THE WATERS
Among the festivals of Southern China none is more popular than the Propitiation of the Gods of the Waters, which takes place during the spring and autumn in villages and cities bordering on the Chu Kiang estuary and the wild ocean banks of the Southern Sea; for these cities and towns have their boats with fathers, husbands and sons scattered over many waters and depend for their sustenance as well as life upon the mercy of the Gods of the Deep.
Contrary to most festivals, this is a festivity of the night. Besides calls, feasting, and the usual merriment of such occasions, it is marked by the procession of the Dragon and an illumination of lanterns.
The Dragon, which is taken through the streets on this night, symbolises the Monarch of the Deep, and is from fifty to a hundred and fifty feet long. This monster, made of silk and covered with glittering scales of gilt is carried by men concealed within it. During the procession it goes through all of the evolutions of its kind; coiling, wriggling, creeping, gliding; every so often darting out its monstrous glaring head after a huge sea-pearl frisked teasingly in front of it. It draws up in rolls, moves in long silken undulations, squirms, twists, lolls, sometimes springing at the spectators. Preceding and following the Dragon are carried enormous models of fish: sharks, perch, whales, pompano, sea-eels, an endless number; gorgeous, gleaming, shaking in the sea of the night their fins and tails of fire.