The vast high hall has the air of holding an occult presence. It is utterly empty. Here silence sits veiled in obscurity. Here are no ornaments, no statues. On each side of the hall we distinguish, between their curtains, great inscriptions; and, before them, altars; but in the middle of the temple, behind five monumental pieces of stone, three vases and two candlesticks; under an edifice of gold, a baldachin or a tabernacle which frames it on all sides; four characters are inscribed upon a vertical column.
Here writing possesses this mystery: it speaks. No moment marks its duration, no position. It is the commencement of an ageless sign. No mouth offers it. It exists; and the worshiper, face to face with it, ponders the written name. Solemnly enunciated in the gloom of the shadowy gold of the baldachin, the sign, between the two columns which are covered with the mystic windings of the dragon, symbolizes its own silence. The immense red hall seems to be the very color of obscurity, the pillars are hidden under a scarlet lacquer. Alone in the middle of the temple, before the sacred word, two columns of white granite seem its witness; the very soul, religious and abstract, of the place.
THE BANYAN
The banyan toils.
This giant does not, like his brother in India, endeavor to seize upon the earth again with his hands; but, raising himself with one turn of the shoulder, he lifts his roots to heaven like accumulated chains. Hardly has the trunk lifted itself several feet above the soil than it stretches its limbs laboriously, each like an arm which tugs away at a bundle of cords it has grasped. With a slow lengthening out, the hauling monster strains himself and labors in all the attitudes of effort so hard that the rude bark splits and the muscles stand out from the skin. There is the straight thrust, the flexing and the support, the twist of loin and shoulder, the slackening of haunches, the play of fulcrum and jack, the straightening up or reaching down of arms which seem to put the body out of joint. It is a knot of pythons, it is a hydra stubbornly tearing itself away from the tenacious earth. You might say that the banyan lifts a burden from the depths and upholds it with its straining limbs.
Honored by the humble settlement, at the gate of the village he is a patriarch clothed in shadowy foliage. At his feet is installed a furnace for offerings; and, in his very heart, under the spreading of his branches, is an altar with a stone doll. Witness of all that passes, possessor of the earth encompassed by multitudinous roots, here the ancient lives; and, whether alone with the children or at the hour when all the village reassembles under the twisted projections of his boughs (as the rosy rays of the moon, passing across the openings of his canopy, illumine the cabal with an outline of gold), the colossal tree, wherever his shadow turns, perseveres in imperceptible effort, adding the passing moment to his accumulated centuries.
Somewhere in mythology are honored the heroes who have distributed water to a country, and, striking a great rock, have delivered the obstructed mouth of a fountain. I see standing in the banyan a Hercules of the vegetable world, a monument of majestic labor. Would it not seem to be by his labors (this monster in chains, who vanquishes the avaricious resistance of the earth) that the springs gush forth and overflow, that grass grows afar off, and water is held at its level in the rice-fields.
He toils.
TOWARD THE MOUNTAIN
Coming out barefoot on the verandah, I look toward the left. On the brow of the mountain, among the torn clouds, a touch of phosphorus indicates the dawn. A movement of lamps in the house, a breakfast while still sleepy and benumbed; and then, with packages stowed away, we start. By the rugged coast we drop down to the neighboring city.