It is the vague hour when cities awaken. Already the open-air cooks blow fires under their stoves. Already in the depths of certain booths a vacillating light illumines nude bodies. In spite of spiked boards that have been placed flat against openings or hung over cornices,—huddled in corners in every free space, men stretch and sleep. Half awake, one scratches his side and stares at us out of the corner of his eyes with an air of delicious comfort. Another sleeps so heavily that you would think he was stuck to the stones. An old man, who has the appearance of being clothed in the scum that forms on stagnant waters, combs his mangy skull with his two hands. And finally, I must not forget that beggar with the head of a cannibal—his wildly disheveled hair bristling like a black bush—who, with one gaunt knee extended, lies flat under the first rays of morning.
Nothing could be stranger than a town at the hour when it sleeps. These streets seem like avenues in a necropolis. These houses exude sleep. And all of them, because of their closed doors, seem to me solemn and monumental. Every one, in the sleep wherein he is buried, suffers that singular change which comes over the faces of the dead. Like a little child with unfocused eyes, who frets and kneads the breast of his nurse with a feeble hand, the man who sleeps, with a great sigh, presses his face to the deep earth. Everything is silent because it is the hour when the earth gives to drink, and no one of her children turns in vain to her liberal breast. The poor and the rich, the young and the old, the just and the unjust, the judge with the prisoner, and man like the animals, all of them drink together like foster-brothers! All is mystery because this is the hour when Man communicates with his mother. The sleeper sleeps and cannot be awakened. He holds the breast and will not let it go. This draught still flows for him.
The street exudes odors of filth and hair.
Now the houses become fewer. We pass groups of banyans; and, in the pond that they shade, a great buffalo, of which we can only see the back and the moon-curved horns, stares at us with eyes of heavy stupor. We pass lines of women going to the fields. When one laughs her mirth spreads and grows feebler on the four faces that follow, and is effaced on the fifth. At the hour when the first ray of the sun traverses the virginal air, we gain the vast and empty plain; and, leaving behind us the tortuous road, we take our way toward the mountain across the fields of rice, tobacco, beans, pumpkins, cucumbers, and sugar-cane.
THE GREAT SEA
Climbing one day, I reach the plateau, and, in its basin of mountains where black islands emerge, I view afar off the great sea. Certainly, by a perilous path, it would be possible for me to gain the shore; but whether I follow its outline or whether I choose to take a boat, the surface remains impenetrable to my gaze. Well, then, I shall play on the flute, I shall beat the tom-tom; and the boat-woman, standing on one leg like a stork while with the other knee she supports her nursing baby as she conducts her sampan across the flat waters, will believe that the gods behind the drawn curtains of the clouds are enjoying themselves in the courts of their temple.
Or, unlacing my shoe, I shall throw it across the lake. Where it falls the passer-by will prostrate himself; and, having picked it up with superstitious awe, he will honor it with four sticks of incense. Or, curving my hands about my mouth, I shall cry out names. The words will die first, then the sound; and the tone alone, reaching the ears of some one, will make him turn from side to side, like a man who hears himself called in a dream and makes an effort to break his bonds.
THE TEMPLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
I have devoted more than one day simply to the discovery of it, ensconced upon its steep cliff of black rock, and it is not till late afternoon that I know myself to be upon the right path. From the giddy height where I climb, the wide rice-fields seem designed like a chart. The brink along which I move is so narrow that whenever I lift my right foot it is poised over the yellow expanse of the sown village fields spread out like a carpet below.
Silence. By an ancient staircase covered with a hoary lichen I descend in the pungent shade of the bay-trees, and, as the footpath at this turning is suddenly barred by a wall, I arrive at a closed door. I listen. No word, no voice, no drum! In vain I shake the wooden handle of the door, and beat upon it rudely with both hands.