PROLOGUE
THE TYPHOON
From the city of Yingching an old road runs northwestward to the mountains of Loh Fou—that indescribable mass of grandeur and mystery, in whose gorges unnumbered monasteries slumber, from whose peaks and cliffs temples gaze benignly down through the somnolent shadows upon the thoughtful progeny of Panku—the World-Chiseller. 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.
Up over these hills the old road climbs laboriously until it disappears through a gorge of its own wearing. After crossing the southern slope it winds through deeply wooded ravines in whose alcoves Buddhist and Taoist monasteries sleep away the fretful ages of man, forming retreats for scholars, who come from Yingching, to escape in their brook-splashed groves the clatter and nagging of men.
This ancient highway struggles on through the White Cloud Hills, mutilated, uncertain; past the great monastery of Kingtai below the southern summits; past reproachful ruins in whose crumbling shadows solitary monks remain to propitiate the spirits of those that once dwelt in their cloisters; past the Silvery Rush Brook whose foam the banished statesman, Su Tungpa, compared, some centuries ago, to human greatness. Crawling, halting along its deep-worn way the old road gropes through gorges, over mountains, across torrents and under the splash of cataracts until it reaches the green, undulating plains of Tsang Tsing. Thence it goes straight through canebrakes, past villages and tombs, under orchards of lichee, past ruins hid beneath creepers and cities old and new.
Below the market-town of Chingkwo the ancient way crosses the Lung Mun River, and, entering the mountains of Loh Fou, is untangled into a hundred strand-like paths leading to monasteries that are hidden among the shadows of every gorge, and to temples hung on the shelves of cliffs. One path goes to the Monastery of Fa-Shau, in its deep pit of shrubs and lanwhui; another climbs up among boulders and cataracts to the Temple of Wa-Shau, thence three thousand feet higher to the Royal Monastery of Putwan, while yet another threading path goes on a thousand feet above where the Temple of the Moon clings to a mountain peak and whither companies of chanting bonzes go from the monasteries below to offer up prayers when the harvest moon is full.
The antiquity of this old road extends back beyond the records of men, but it is known that, centuries after its trace had been deeply scarred through the White Cloud Hills and across the plains of Tsang Tsing, it was made into a king’s highway and paved with granite blocks, eight feet long, two feet broad and often a foot in thickness. Yet the long bare tread has not only eroded them away, but hills have been worn down and cañons have been made by these century streams of men’s feet, treading to and fro and dwelling by it for so long that their comings and goings are unknown. For babes were born on this way and reared by its trace long before the she-wolf suckled Silvia’s twins on the old road by the Tiber’s bank. And like the road of Cenis, it has been traversed by armies of different ages; it has resounded with their triumphant march; it has echoed with the furtive footfall of their flight; the pageants of Emperors have passed over it—and long files of sighing beggars.
One September afternoon on this old road, past the ruins of Kingtai and near the southern summits of the White Cloud Hills, were seen neither porters nor farmers nor beggars nor the retinues of mandarins. The road was deserted other than by two men climbing slowly to the summit.
The sultry heat of the afternoon was choking, and at short intervals the men halted to gain their breath and wipe the perspiration from their faces. An oppressive, nervous lassitude weighed down the air; neither from bush nor tree, from hillside nor glen, was to be seen or heard a living creature.