Edward was on the broad weedy path that ran on the top of the wall. The seeds of flowers and tall grasses had accepted the wall as part of the soil of China. Edward went into the high beamed hall of the guard-house. The moonlight made strange and glorious broad spaces of its dusty floor; its dazzled windows looked out on naked moonlight. It was so full of silence that its old walls cracked.
That corner of Peking was a watching corner. A little further on the dragons of the Observatory watched the stars. Great wild bucking dragons bore on their backs or between their claws huge secret instruments which, in the belief of men and dragons, prepare the way of the Lord and make his paths straight. The bronze dragons of the Peking Observatory are only a little junior to history, but Edward did not know that. He tried feebly to open the locked gate and then forgot and left the dragons, the spying and puritan dragons, holding their check on the wild and dancing stars.
To the west Peking was like an enchanted forest in the milky half light. No house declared itself among the trees except the great insolent hotel which raised itself like a banner of unworthy victory over the quiet city. Beyond Peking, far away, were the Western Hills, their outline a wild tossing together of angles, their chequered surface broken by strange folds and scars.
There was a light other than the moon. It was not a sudden light but Edward realised it suddenly. The dawn was creeping up behind him to devour him unawares. The centre of the universe had shifted. The dawn was a subtler miracle than was the moon; the dawn succeeded to the empire of the moon.
Light ran like a snake along the tops of the Western Hills. There was a spear of flame along the eastern horizon. Little escaping clouds caught fire; there was an ominous look of molten gold where the east made ready the first step of the stair for the sun’s ascent. The sun pointed its sword abruptly at Peking. The golden roofs of the Imperial City most gloriously received the challenge. The city threw away its cloak of mystery and the birds sang. A blue cart, its long peak stretching forward as far as the ears of the mule that drew it, its little fretted windows set into the blue tunnel that covered it, heaved slowly along a red track from the east into the sunstricken city.
The dam of day had burst.
Edward thought, “Emily is somewhere, drowning, asleep in that lake of sunlight. I can find her now. I have begun finding instead of losing now....”
Where does hope set its roots? Out of what blessed and silly seed does hope rise like a flower, fed by nothing more reasonable than a piercing of sunlight through air full of birds’ songs? It is curious how joyfully we pluck and wear at our hearts that fatal hope that has sprung from the seed of a dream or of the little wind that passes across the morning.
“Hope is a true thing,” thought Edward when he looked, later in the morning, at the hotel register. There were the names.
“Mr. and Mrs. Tam McTab—not so well but unfortunately more correctly known as