Now, by a series of stairs where the central hand-rail still shows the imperial dragon, I cross the ravaged site of terraces and courts. These are the walks of Memory, the fugitive traces of lives which, leaving the earth, serve only to enrich it by decay; the steps of sacrifices, the awful garden where what is destroyed attests its whilom existence in the presence of what still remains. In the center a throne supports, a baldachin still shelters, the inscription of a dynasty. All about, temples and guest-houses have become a confused rubbish among the briars.
And the tomb is before me.
Between massive projections of the square bastions which flank it, behind the deep-cut channel of the third stream, is a wall which assures us that the end of our journey must be here. A wall and nothing but a wall, a hundred feet high and two hundred feet wide. Eroded by the use of centuries, the inexorable barrier presents a blind face of masonry. A single round hole shows in the center of the base, the mouth of an oven or the oubliette of a dungeon. This wall forms the front of a sort of trapezoid formation, detached from the mountain which overhangs it. A low molding, ending beneath an overhanging cornice, stands out from the wall like a console. No corpse is so suspect as to require such a mass being placed upon him. This is the throne of Death itself, the regal exaltation of sepulture.
A straight alley, remounting the sloping plain, crosses a level plateau. At the end there is only the same mountain whose steep slope conceals in its depths the ancient Ming.
And I understand that this is the sepulcher of the Atheist. Time has scattered the vain temples and laid the idols in the dust, and only the arrangement of the place remains, with the idea it expressed. The pompous catafalques on the threshold have not been able to retain the dead. The cortège of his vanished glory cannot retard him. He crosses the three rivers, he traverses the manifold courts filled with incense; nor is the monument that has been prepared for him sufficient to hold him. He cleaves his way further, and enters into the very body and bones of primitive earth. It is merely an animal interment, the mixing of crude flesh with inert and compact clay. The king and peasant are forever consolidated into this death without a dream or an awakening.
But the shadow of evening spreads over this cruel place. Oh ruins, the tomb has survived you! And the brutal stolidity of this bulk is a perfect symbol of death itself.
As I return among the colossal statues of stone, I see in the dried grass the decaying corpse of a horse, which a dog is tearing. The beast looks at me as he licks the blood which trickles down his chops; then, applying his paws again to the red carcass, he tears off a long strip of flesh. The mangled remains are spread about.
THE MELANCHOLY WATER
There is an intelligence in joy, I admit it. There is a vision in laughter. But that you may comprehend, my friend, this medley of blessedness and bitterness which the act of creation includes, now that the melancholy season begins I shall explain to you the sadness of water.
The same tear falls from the sky that overflows from the eyelid. Do not think to accuse the cloud of your melancholy, nor this veil of vague showers. Shut your eyes; listen! The rain falls.