The Yellow Sea was really yellow. It was thickly yellow and reflected no light. It was more like a desert than a sea. The eye would have found a string of camels crossing the sea no anomaly.
The Pei-ho River was yellow too. The ship entered the river between low mud forts. Salt was stacked on a broad streaky plain to the north. Primitive windmills, like merry-go-rounds at English fairs, whirled among the stacks of salt. The earth was yellow, the water was yellow, the long slanted wave that ran after the ship was yellow and, breaking over the squeaking yellow babies on the shore, left them a little yellower. The villages were of yellow mud; the blind mud houses had no angles; they were like beehives. There was a ragged yellow camel kneeling self-consciously in a street; he kneeled as though his hind legs were broken. A little girl in dark strawberry red—an exquisite color for a dweller in golden mud—watched the camel from a dark doorway. The boats in the river had nets stretched between bending slim poles hinged to their masts. When, worked by primitive levers, these nets were bowed to the water and rose spangled and silvered, the boats were like dragonflies resting delicately on the water.
Tientsin ... a few dusty hours in a train ... Peking. The train seemed to collide with Peking. The high city wall approached the railroad at a steep angle. The train seemed to glance from the wall without impact. Edward found himself outside the Water Gate, at the inner wall of Peking.
He became a ghost in a soundless ricksha. Lights pricked his eyes. There was nothing in this Peking but houses transplanted from European suburbs. There was an English bank, there were English business men, English soldiers, French soldiers, small serene policemen in commonplace khaki uniform, several Chevrolet cars ... finally an immense hotel, the road to which was lined by rickshas at rest with sweating coolies sitting on their shafts.
“Emily can’t be here. This is not Peking. Peking has been stolen away. Emily has been stolen away.”
Edward took a room in the hotel. He did not know how he would pay for it. He thought he would be here forever; he hoped that he would soon die; perhaps, through dimming eyes, he would see at last the real Peking and Emily running urgently towards him. “Too late, Emily ... too late....”
The great lobby of the hotel was like purgatory. Surely it would have held all the saints and sinners of the world. The saints and sinners sat in large absorbing chairs and at little tables, waiting till the time came when they might do something else. There was dance music in the distance, a beat like a hammer behind one’s head. The beat fought with the beat of Edward’s heart; it was intolerable. He could hear and feel the beat of his heart louder and louder as he drank cocktail after cocktail. Cocktails here at any rate were better than they would have been had he found the real Peking. A broad serene face crowning a high-necked robe of green gold filled Edward’s imagination when he thought of Peking. Over that face a banner waved, and as it waved the wild gold dragon on the banner whipped his length about but could not escape. Even the man who brought another cocktail had something to say about this dragon, Edward thought. “The moon is his saddle ...” the cocktail man seemed to say. It was true; the dragon was saddled by the curve of the satiny moon. Edward had seen the moon from the other side of the Water Gate, when the real Peking had still seemed to be in front of him. Perhaps he could find Peking after all, in the light of the young moon. It was very late. There was hardly time to go to bed, not time, in his present mood, to take off one damp, snarling garment after another, to wash his hot and tired body, to find his way uncertainly into an unknown bed. It would be morning in a breath.
He went out. He walked east. The air was cool and the sharp brittle rays of the stars made him feel as though he were on the verge of being more widely awake than ever man was before. Here were trees and a very broad moonlit street. Here, suddenly, was Peking. A great gate cast its mountainous tented shadow to his feet. The curves of the roofs above the gate were high and ample and optimistic. The moon shone through the deserted windows of the high guard-house. There were soldiers at the gate so Edward went no nearer to its arch. But he waded in its clean shadow upon the uneven dust of the street. He walked still east, along very narrow streets. There were no straight roofs at all; all the eaves turned up as if the roofs were of drooping dark silk with their hems slung to the stars, or as if the houses were dancing and swinging gay skirts.
There was an open space; low trees splashed shadows on white dust and wet grass. Peking was not so tightly packed within its walls but that a wide space might be left in the angle of one corner of the walls, a space where goats and donkeys had their lodging. Beggars slept here too, but Edward’s tread on the dust did not wake them.
The walls barred his way. They were new-looking walls, he thought, almost silver in the moonlight, the design of castellation fencing the outer rim was unbroken. But the guard-house on the corner of the wall looked forgotten and old. There was a brick slope which climbed to the top of the wall. Iron gates barred both the foot and the head of the slope, but the gates were easily climbed.