The East I know

by Paul Claudel

I myself live in this country of sepulchers, and by a different road I regain my house on the summit of the hill.

The town is below on the other side of the wide yellow river Min, which precipitates its deep and violent waters between the arches of the Bridge of Ten Thousand Ages. During the day one can see, like the copings of the tombs, the rampart of jagged mountains that enclose the city. The flying pigeons and the tower in the middle of a pagoda make one feel the immensity of this distance. And I can see the two-horned roofs, two wooded hills rising between the houses, and on the river a confusion of wooden rafts and junks whose poops are painted with pictures. But now it is too dark. Scarcely a fire pricks the dusk and the mist beneath me, and by a road I know, slipping into the funereal darkness of the pines, I gain my habitual post, this great triple tomb blackened with moss and age, oxidized like armor, which thrusts its frowning parapet obliquely into space.

I come here to listen.

Chinese cities have neither factories nor vehicles. The only noise that can be heard, when evening comes and the fracas of trade ceases, is the human voice. I come to listen for that; for, when one loses interest in the sense of the words that are offered him, he can still lend them a more subtle ear. Nearly a million inhabitants live here. I listen to the speech of this multitude far under a lake of air. It is a clamor at once torrential and crackling, shot through with sudden abrupt rips like the tearing of paper. I am sure one can distinguish now and then a note and its modulations, as one does a chord on a drum, by putting his fingers on the right places. Has the city a different murmur at different times in the day? I propose to test it. At this moment it is evening. They are volubly publishing the day’s news. Each one believes that he alone is speaking. He recounts quarrels, meals, household happenings, family affairs, his work, his commerce, his politics. But his words do not perish. They carry—part of the innumerable additions to the collective voice. Shorn of their meaning they continue only as the unintelligible elements of the sound which carries them; utterance, intonation, accent. As there is a mingling of sounds, is there a blending of the sense? And what is the grammar of this general discourse? Guest of the dead, I listen long to the murmur, the noise that the living make afar!

Now it is time to return. The pines, between whose high shafts I pursue my road, deepen the shadows of night. It is the hour when one commences to see the fire-flies, hearth fires of the grass. As in the depth of meditation an intuition passes, so quickly that the spirit can perceive merely a glimmer, a sudden indication; so this impalpable crumb of fire burns, and in the same moment is extinguished.

THE ENTRANCE TO THE EARTH

Rather than assail the escarpments of the mountain with the iron point of my stick I should prefer to see, from this low, flat plain across which I wander, the mountains seated around me like a hundred ancient men in the glory of the afternoon. The sun of Pentecost illumines the earth, swept and garnished and impressive as a church. The air is so cool and so clear that it seems as if I walked naked. All is peace. One hears on all sides, like the cry of a flute, the notes of chain-pumps in unison, drawing water from the fields (three by three, the men and women beat upon the triple wheel, their arms hooked to the beam, their laughing faces covered with sweat), and a friendly territory opens before the steps of the walker.

I measure with my eyes the circuit I must follow. I know how, from the top of the mountain, the plain with its fields will resemble an old stained-glass window with irregular panes set in a network of lead. By straight footpaths of the earth that frames the rice-fields, I finally begin on the paved way.

It crosses the rice-fields, the orange groves, the villages,—guarded at one outlet by their great banyan (the Father to whom all the children of the country are brought for adoption) and at the other, not far from the wells of water and pits of manure, by the fane of the local gods who, both armed from head to foot with bow at belly, painted on the gate, roll their tri-colored eyes toward each other. And, as I advance turning my head from right to left, I taste slowly the changes of the hours, because, as a perpetual wayfarer, a wise judge of the length of shadows, nothing of the august ceremony of the day escapes me. Drunk with beholding, I understand it all. This bridge still to cross in the peace of the lunch hour, these hills to climb and to descend, this valley to traverse; and already I see, between three pines, the steep rock where I must take up my post to assist at the crowning ceremony of that which was a day.

It is the moment of solemn reception when the sun crosses the threshold of the earth. Fifteen hours ago it passed the line of the illimitable sea; and, like an eagle resting motionless on its wings to examine the country from afar, it has gained the highest part of the sky. Now it declines its course and the earth opens to receive it. The gorge to which the sun sets its mouth disappears under the level rays as if it were devoured by fire. The mountain where a conflagration has flared up like a crater, sends toward the sky an enormous column of smoke. And below, touched by an oblique ray, the line of a torrent flashes. Behind spreads out the earth of all the earth, Asia with Europe; like the central height of an altar, an immense plain; and then, far beyond that, like a man flat on his face on the water, France; and, in the thickest of France, joyous and fertile Champagne. Only the top of the golden targe can be seen now, and at the moment it disappears the evening star sends across the sky a dark and vertical ray. It is the time when the sea which follows it, lifting itself from its bed with a profound cry, hurls its shoulder against the earth.