The two men, approaching the top of the White Cloud Hills, were as silent as their surroundings, and, until they reached the summit, when the Valley of the Chu Kiang and the City of Yingching lay below them, they appeared as unconscious of each other’s presence as they were apparently oblivious to their surroundings. But when they came to the bare mountain top, the manner of the older man changed; anxiously he scanned the sky, the horizon, the fields and the river below them as if to find in the wide estuary of the Chu Kiang some cause for alarm.
Nothing could have been more peaceful or beautiful. The sky was cloudless, the horizon faintly hazy, while the slanting rays of the sun cast a golden sheen upon the great river and the rice-fields that extended from it to the hills. These fields, in different shades of green and brown, interlaced with canals, were like a great shimmering, silken quilt stitched together by threads of gold. Far eastward, on the left, they merged into banana plantations, orchards of olive and lichee; westward they ended at the edge of the eastern suburbs of Yingching.
The city, seen from the summit where the two men stood, appeared a vast expanse of reddish roofs, shaded here and there by groves of banians. A great old wall encircled the old city, but dimmed by distance, its broken merlons were not seen nor the ravages of war, nor the erosions of a thousand years, nor the veiling draperies of maiden-hair fern that hung from the chipped interstices. These huge, aged and lichen-warted walls loomed up black, impregnable. Outside of them the eastern suburbs could be seen extending from under the East Gate obliquely in direction of and along the bank of the river, while the western and southern suburbs were hidden by them. Above the city, on the heights where climbed the northern wall, rose the Great Sea-Guarding Tower. Just south of it, within the walls, was the wooded peak of Yueshan surrounded with the clustering courts and temples of the Goddess of Mercy—that many-handed Goddess, who is so great in pity and compassion, saving from misery and from woe, and who is ever listening to the cries that come up from the world. Below the Temples, near by, in the centre of the city, two pagodas pierce the sky, one round and tapering, the other octagonal. Geomancers squinting up at them, say that this city is like a junk; that these two pagodas are her masts and the broad, five-storied tower on the north wall her stern sheets, and that the city is thus sailing southward, toward the island of Honan, which lies on the other side of the river, or beyond where rice-fields shimmer and the sky-line is serrated by low, ragged hills.
Here and there over the estuary of the Chu Kiang in the midst of their paddy-fields and orchards, lay walled towns and villages, half hidden under banians, while on the distant river bank, directly opposite the two men, the Lob pagodas point skyward, like great fingers, and on their left the pagodas of Wampoa and the Golden Lotus pierce the sky.
It was the peace, the dumb, inanimate peace of this scene that alarmed the older man. The river, usually teeming with a vast number and diversity of craft, was deserted other than now and then when a boat crept furtively along its southern bank. The fields were without men or oxen; the city and all the tree-veiled villages, which were scattered about among the fields, were silent, and a thin blue haze hung motionless over them.
For some time the two men looked down upon the delightful yet ominous panorama spread out beneath them; the older man troubled and uneasy, but the youth affected in no way, neither by the beauty nor the dumbness of it.
When they began to descend the elder left the old road sloping gradually along the hills toward the city, and led the way down by a steep path that, on reaching the level, meandered along the paddy banks in the direction of the river. But before they came to the river’s high embankment the sun had set, and as they turned westward along the top of the bank the older man suddenly stopped. Directly over the part of the horizon where the sun had disappeared hung a great halo, the under part of which gleamed red, the top was shrouded in black while between scintillated iridescent colours; below the black lay a cold mottled grey and above the red glowed a pink like the cheek of a young girl.
For some moments these colours hung distinctly over the misty horizon then commingled—the corpse-grey with the cheek of the maiden—and over all, the pall of black. The halo became ashen; wavered—vanished.
As the youth started to go the older man placed a detaining hand on his shoulder and pointed toward the sky-line where but a moment before the halo had hung.
Presently from where the sun had sunk were seen spreading enormous rays of light. Upward they unfolded, stretching finger-like, clear across the sky until they dipped their tips below the eastern horizon. At first these great fingers shone red as though dyed with blood, then vermilion, changing gradually through all the gold shades to an orange-saffron. When the finger-rays burned red, the intervening spaces were violet; when saffron, the sky was a pale green.