THE HANGING HOUSE
By a subterranean stairway I descend to the hanging house. Just as the swallow fashions her shelter with patience, between the planks and the rafter, and the seagull glues her nest like a pannier to the rock; so, by a system of clamps, bolts, and girders driven into the stone, the wooden box that I inhabit is solidly attached to the arch of an enormous porch hollowed in the mountain itself. A trap-door arranged in the floor connects me with the world; by means of it on both these days, letting my little basket drop at the end of a cord, I have drawn it up filled with a little rice, some roasted pistachio nuts, and vegetables pickled in brine. In a corner of the formidable masonry, like a trophy made of Medusa’s tresses, hangs a fountain whose inexhaustible lament is carried away in a whirlpool. I draw up the water I need by means of a cord knotted in open meshes, and the smoke of my cooking mingles with the spray of the cascade.
The torrent is lost among the Palms, and I see below me the crowns of the great trees from which they draw sacerdotal perfumes. And, as a shattering of crystal is enough to disturb the night, all the keyboard of the earth is awakened by this neutral, hollow jingling of rain on that deep flint.
I see in the monstrous niche where I am ensconced the very tympanum of the massive mountain, like an ear hollowed in the temporal rock. And, collecting all my attention, bending all my joints, I will attempt to hear, above the murmur of leaves and birds, those sounds which this enormous and secret pavilion undoubtedly gives access to: the oscillations of the universal waters, the shifting of geological strata, the groans of the hurtling earth under an effort contrary to gravitation.
Once a year the moon rises at my left above this escarpment, cutting the shadows at the height of my waist on so exact a level that, with ever so little more delicacy and precaution, I could float a plate of copper upon it. But I like best the last step of the stairway, which descends into the void. Many times I have awakened from meditation, bathed in the dews of the night like a rose-bush; or, in the comfortable afternoon, I have appeared to throw handfuls of dry letches like little red bells to the monkeys perched below me on the furthest branches.
THE SPRING
The crow, adjusting one eye on me as the clock-maker does on his watch, would see me, a precise, miniature person—a cane like a dart between my fingers—advancing by the straight footpath, moving briskly along.
The country, between the mountains that enclose it, is as flat as the bottom of a frying-pan. To right and left the work of harvesting goes on; they shear the earth as if it were a sheep. I dispute the width of the path, and my place on it, with an uninterrupted file of workers; those who are going to the fields, spade at belt; those who are returning, bending like scales under the weight of double baskets whose form is at once round and square, joining the symbols of the earth and the sky.
I walk a long time; the open air is as close as a room, the sky is somber, and the long columns of stagnant smoke are stationary like the remains of some barbaric pyre. I leave the shorn rice-fields and the harvest-fields of slime; and, little by little, I mount the narrowing gorge. Useless reeds succeed the fields of sugar-cane; and three times, with shoes in hands, I cross the rapid waters gathered into the current of a river. I have undertaken to find the source of one of these streams that feed the river, here, where it arises in the heart of a five-gorged valley. The ascent becomes more difficult as the thread of the cascade extends. I leave beneath me the last field of potatoes, and, all at once, I have entered into a wood like that which on Parnassus served for the assembly of the Muses! All about me the tea-plants lift their distorted shoots and their dry, somber foliage,—so high that my stretched hand cannot reach it. Charming retreat! Quaint and mysterious shadow, enameled with a perpetual flowering! A delicate perfume, which seems to survive rather than emanate, flatters the nostril while recreating the spirit. And in a hollow I discover the spring! Like grain out of a furious hopper the water from beneath the earth bursts forth, leaping and bubbling. Impurities are absorbed. Only that which is pure, untainted at the source, leaps out. Born of the roseate sky (gathered in what profound matrix!) the virgin water, with living force, pours from the opening like a cry. Happy those from whom a new word bursts with violence! May my mouth be supplied forever like this spring,—which, sustained by a perpetual, solitary renewal, cares not that it must serve for the works of Man,—for those lowlands where, spreading wide and inundating the tilth, it will nourish the vast, stagnant harvest-fields.