The other garden is more singular.
It was almost night when, penetrating into its square enclosure, I saw it filled to its walls with a vast landscape. Picture a mass of rocks, a chaos, a confusion of overthrown blocks, heaped up together as if by the force of the sea; a vision of madness, a country as ghastly as a brain with its convolutions bared. The Chinese flay their landscapes. Inexplicable as nature, this little corner seems also as vast and as complex. Among these rocks rises a dark and twisted pine-tree. The warped trunk, the color of its bristling tufts, the violent dislocation of its limbs, the disproportion of this single tree with the artificial country which it dominates,—like a dragon issuing from the earth in smoke, combating the wind and the storms,—make this place unreal, render it grotesque and fantastic. Here and there funereal foliage, yews and arbor-vitæ, in their vigorous blackness, intensify this cataclysm. In my amazement I ponder this melancholy document. And in the middle of the enclosure one great rock stands in the dusk of twilight like a monster,—a theme of reverie and enigma.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] White is the color of Chinese mourning.
THE FEAST OF THE DEAD IN THE
SEVENTH MONTH
Ingots of paper are the money of the dead. From thin cards are cut the figures of persons, houses, and animals. The dead man must be followed by these fragile imitations, these patterns of living things; and, if burned, they will accompany him where he goes. The flute guides such souls, the beat of a gong assembles them like bees. In the shadowy darkness, the brilliance of a flame soothes and satisfies them.
Along the bank of the river the prepared barges wait for the night to come. Scarlet tinsel is fastened to the end of a pole; and, whether the river at this turning seems to derive the color of its waters from a leaden sky, or whether it moves its swarming life mysteriously under accumulated clouds,—still the torches flare at the prow, the festoons of lanterns toss from the mast, brightening the gloom with a vivid note,—as a candle held in the hand in a spacious room lightens the solemn emptiness of the night. Meanwhile the signal is given, the flutes shrill out, the gong sounds, firecrackers explode, the three boatmen lean to the long scull. The barge starts and tacks, leaving in the wide sweep of its rudder a trail of fire. Some one is strewing little lamps. Uncertain glimmers on the vast flow of the opaque waters, these flicker a moment and perish. An arm seizes the tinsel streamer, the ball of fire which sinks and flares in the smoke, and touches them to the tomb of the waters; the illusory brightness of the light, like the gleaming of fish, fascinates the cold drowned. Other illuminated barges go and come. Far off are heard detonations, and on the war-ships two bugles, answering one another, sound together the extinguishing of the fires.
The loitering stranger who, from the shore, contemplates the vast night open before him like a chart, will hear the return of the religious barge. The torches are extinguished, the shrill hautboy has died away, but, over a precipitate beating of drumsticks, dominated by a continual rolling of drums, the funereal gong continues its tumult and its dance. Who is it that beats? The sound rises and falls, ends, recommences, and presently swells to a clamor as if impatient hands beat on the metal hung between two worlds. Then solemnly, beneath the measured strokes, the gong returns a deep reverberation. The boat approaches. It passes the river-bank and the fleet of moored craft; and now, in the heavy darkness of the opium barges, it is at my feet. I can see nothing; but the funeral orchestra, which had died away for a long interval, now, after the fashion of dogs that howl, explodes again in the darkness.
This is the feast of the seventh month when the earth enters into its repose. Along the road the rickshaw-runners have stuck in the earth between their feet sticks of incense and little red candle-ends. I must return. Tomorrow I shall come to sit in the same place. It is all over; and still, like the sightless dead sunk beneath an infinity of waves, I hear the tone of the sepulchral sistrum, the clamor of iron drums beaten with terrible blows in the close darkness.