Wednesday, October 24.
The same glorious sunshine in gallery, garden, and wood. Each day the work of our soldiers with their gangs of Chinese laborers goes on in the nave of the Cathedral; they carefully separate such treasures as have remained intact, or nearly so, from what is irreparably injured. There is a continual coming and going across our court of furniture and precious bronzes in hand-barrows; all that is taken out of the church is put in places not at present needed for our troops, to await its final transportation to the Ancestors' Palace, where it is to remain under lock and key.
We have seen so many of these magnificent things that we are satiated and worn with them. The most remarkable discoveries made from the depths of the oldest cases have ceased to astonish us; there is nothing now that we want for the decoration—oh, so fleeting—of our apartments; nothing is sufficiently beautiful for our Heliogabalean fancies. There will be no to-morrow, for the inventory must be finished within a few days, and then our long galleries will be parcelled out for officers' rooms and offices.
In the way of discoveries, we came this morning upon a pile of bodies,—the last defenders of the Imperial City, who fell all in a heap and have remained in positions indicative of extreme agony. The crows and the dogs have gone down into the ditch where they lie and have devoured eyes, chests, and intestines; there is no flesh left on their bones, and their red spinal columns show through their ragged raiment. Shoes are left, but no hair; Chinamen have evidently descended into the deep hole with the dogs and the crows, and have scalped the dead in order to make false queues.
To-day I leave the Palace of the North early and for all day, as I must go over to the European quarter to see our Minister at the Spanish legation, where he was taken in; he is still in bed, but convalescing so that at last I can make to him the communications which I undertook on behalf of the admiral.
For four days I have not been outside the red walls of the Imperial City, have not left our superb solitude. So when I find myself once more among the ugly gray ruins of the commonplace streets of the Tartar City, in everybody's Pekin, in the Pekin known to all travellers, I appreciate better the unique peculiarities of our great wood, of our lake, and of all our forbidden glories.
However, this city of the people seems less forlorn than on the day of my arrival in the wind and snow. The people are beginning to return, as I have been told; Pekin is being repopulated, the shops are opening, houses are rebuilding, and already a few humble and entertaining trades have been taken up along the streets, on tables, under tents, and under parasols. The warm sunshine of the Chinese autumn is the friend of many a poor wretch who has no fire.
VII
THE TEMPLE OF THE LAMAS
The Temple of the Lamas, the oldest sanctuary in Pekin, and one of the most curious in the world, contains a profusion of marvellous work of the old Chinese gold and silver smiths, and a library of inestimable value.