Читать книгу The Vermilion Pencil - Homer Lea - Страница 4

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From the city of Yingching an old road runs northwestward to the mountains of Loh Fou—that indescribable mass of grandeur and mystery, in whose gorges unnumbered monasteries slumber, from whose peaks and cliffs temples gaze benignly down through the somnolent shadows upon the thoughtful progeny of Panku—the World-Chiseller. This slab-worn road, after it leaves the suburbs clustering around the East Gate of Yingching, follows right-obliquely across the rice-fields to the foot of the White Cloud Hills.

To the residents of Yingching these hills have always been a source of delight, and for uncounted ages multitudes have crowded at sunset the towers and pavilions of the city walls to watch their glens and slopes become veiled in a filtering of delicate shades—lilac, amethyst and violet, until, through a deep of purple, they vanish into night—a fluttering of gorgeous shadows.

Up over these hills the old road climbs laboriously until it disappears through a gorge of its own wearing. After crossing the southern slope it winds through deeply wooded ravines in whose alcoves Buddhist and Taoist monasteries sleep away the fretful ages of man, forming retreats for scholars, who come from Yingching, to escape in their brook-splashed groves the clatter and nagging of men.

This ancient highway struggles on through the White Cloud Hills, mutilated, uncertain; past the great monastery of Kingtai below the southern summits; past reproachful ruins in whose crumbling shadows solitary monks remain to propitiate the spirits of those that once dwelt in their cloisters; past the Silvery Rush Brook whose foam the banished statesman, Su Tungpa, compared, some centuries ago, to human greatness. Crawling, halting along its deep-worn way the old road gropes through gorges, over mountains, across torrents and under the splash of cataracts until it reaches the green, undulating plains of Tsang Tsing. Thence it goes straight through canebrakes, past villages and tombs, under orchards of lichee, past ruins hid beneath creepers and cities old and new.

Below the market-town of Chingkwo the ancient way crosses the Lung Mun River, and, entering the mountains of Loh Fou, is untangled into a hundred strand-like paths leading to monasteries that are hidden among the shadows of every gorge, and to temples hung on the shelves of cliffs. One path goes to the Monastery of Fa-Shau, in its deep pit of shrubs and lanwhui; another climbs up among boulders and cataracts to the Temple of Wa-Shau, thence three thousand feet higher to the Royal Monastery of Putwan, while yet another threading path goes on a thousand feet above where the Temple of the Moon clings to a mountain peak and whither companies of chanting bonzes go from the monasteries below to offer up prayers when the harvest moon is full.

The antiquity of this old road extends back beyond the records of men, but it is known that, centuries after its trace had been deeply scarred through the White Cloud Hills and across the plains of Tsang Tsing, it was made into a king’s highway and paved with granite blocks, eight feet long, two feet broad and often a foot in thickness. Yet the long bare tread has not only eroded them away, but hills have been worn down and cañons have been made by these century streams of men’s feet, treading to and fro and dwelling by it for so long that their comings and goings are unknown. For babes were born on this way and reared by its trace long before the she-wolf suckled Silvia’s twins on the old road by the Tiber’s bank. And like the road of Cenis, it has been traversed by armies of different ages; it has resounded with their triumphant march; it has echoed with the furtive footfall of their flight; the pageants of Emperors have passed over it—and long files of sighing beggars.

One September afternoon on this old road, past the ruins of Kingtai and near the southern summits of the White Cloud Hills, were seen neither porters nor farmers nor beggars nor the retinues of mandarins. The road was deserted other than by two men climbing slowly to the summit.

The sultry heat of the afternoon was choking, and at short intervals the men halted to gain their breath and wipe the perspiration from their faces. An oppressive, nervous lassitude weighed down the air; neither from bush nor tree, from hillside nor glen, was to be seen or heard a living creature.

The two men, approaching the top of the White Cloud Hills, were as silent as their surroundings, and, until they reached the summit, when the Valley of the Chu Kiang and the City of Yingching lay below them, they appeared as unconscious of each other’s presence as they were apparently oblivious to their surroundings. But when they came to the bare mountain top, the manner of the older man changed; anxiously he scanned the sky, the horizon, the fields and the river below them as if to find in the wide estuary of the Chu Kiang some cause for alarm.

Nothing could have been more peaceful or beautiful. The sky was cloudless, the horizon faintly hazy, while the slanting rays of the sun cast a golden sheen upon the great river and the rice-fields that extended from it to the hills. These fields, in different shades of green and brown, interlaced with canals, were like a great shimmering, silken quilt stitched together by threads of gold. Far eastward, on the left, they merged into banana plantations, orchards of olive and lichee; westward they ended at the edge of the eastern suburbs of Yingching.

The city, seen from the summit where the two men stood, appeared a vast expanse of reddish roofs, shaded here and there by groves of banians. A great old wall encircled the old city, but dimmed by distance, its broken merlons were not seen nor the ravages of war, nor the erosions of a thousand years, nor the veiling draperies of maiden-hair fern that hung from the chipped interstices. These huge, aged and lichen-warted walls loomed up black, impregnable. Outside of them the eastern suburbs could be seen extending from under the East Gate obliquely in direction of and along the bank of the river, while the western and southern suburbs were hidden by them. Above the city, on the heights where climbed the northern wall, rose the Great Sea-Guarding Tower. Just south of it, within the walls, was the wooded peak of Yueshan surrounded with the clustering courts and temples of the Goddess of Mercy—that many-handed Goddess, who is so great in pity and compassion, saving from misery and from woe, and who is ever listening to the cries that come up from the world. Below the Temples, near by, in the centre of the city, two pagodas pierce the sky, one round and tapering, the other octagonal. Geomancers squinting up at them, say that this city is like a junk; that these two pagodas are her masts and the broad, five-storied tower on the north wall her stern sheets, and that the city is thus sailing southward, toward the island of Honan, which lies on the other side of the river, or beyond where rice-fields shimmer and the sky-line is serrated by low, ragged hills.

Here and there over the estuary of the Chu Kiang in the midst of their paddy-fields and orchards, lay walled towns and villages, half hidden under banians, while on the distant river bank, directly opposite the two men, the Lob pagodas point skyward, like great fingers, and on their left the pagodas of Wampoa and the Golden Lotus pierce the sky.

It was the peace, the dumb, inanimate peace of this scene that alarmed the older man. The river, usually teeming with a vast number and diversity of craft, was deserted other than now and then when a boat crept furtively along its southern bank. The fields were without men or oxen; the city and all the tree-veiled villages, which were scattered about among the fields, were silent, and a thin blue haze hung motionless over them.

For some time the two men looked down upon the delightful yet ominous panorama spread out beneath them; the older man troubled and uneasy, but the youth affected in no way, neither by the beauty nor the dumbness of it.

When they began to descend the elder left the old road sloping gradually along the hills toward the city, and led the way down by a steep path that, on reaching the level, meandered along the paddy banks in the direction of the river. But before they came to the river’s high embankment the sun had set, and as they turned westward along the top of the bank the older man suddenly stopped. Directly over the part of the horizon where the sun had disappeared hung a great halo, the under part of which gleamed red, the top was shrouded in black while between scintillated iridescent colours; below the black lay a cold mottled grey and above the red glowed a pink like the cheek of a young girl.

For some moments these colours hung distinctly over the misty horizon then commingled—the corpse-grey with the cheek of the maiden—and over all, the pall of black. The halo became ashen; wavered—vanished.

As the youth started to go the older man placed a detaining hand on his shoulder and pointed toward the sky-line where but a moment before the halo had hung.

Presently from where the sun had sunk were seen spreading enormous rays of light. Upward they unfolded, stretching finger-like, clear across the sky until they dipped their tips below the eastern horizon. At first these great fingers shone red as though dyed with blood, then vermilion, changing gradually through all the gold shades to an orange-saffron. When the finger-rays burned red, the intervening spaces were violet; when saffron, the sky was a pale green.

The youth watched dreamily these fingers tremble, coruscate, and change.

“It is God’s benediction,” he murmured.

“Or the Devil’s,” growled the other.

The two men waited until the great crepuscular rays, changing every instant their gorgeous colourings, had disappeared, leaving a red diffused light blotting the western sky, while a faint spectral mist crept along the eastern horizon. Troubled, the older man watched this whitish haze creeping along until it covered the eastern sky, then he hastened toward the city and the youth followed meditatively after him.

When they reached the edge of the suburbs they found all the field workers, women and oxen passively huddled about their mud-walled dwellings. Boatmen had drawn up their sampans and fishing craft high upon the bank. And in the doorways frightened faces peered uneasily down the river while everywhere rustled that restlessness, a fretfulness that is known by its silence. The children alone made their accustomed noises. Nothing could disconcert them. They played tag with Death and cried:

“You are it!”

As the two men entered the suburbs these children were in the midst of that bubbling, which marks the end of a day’s play. They were having unusual sport.

Along the coast of Southern China, among the many warnings that foretell the iron whirlwind’s approach none is more peculiar than the actions of dragon-flies, which seem to seek the companionship of men. They swarm into villages, fasten themselves on every projection, even lighting on the heads and shoulders of the inhabitants. Children, regardless of what they portend, seize upon them, and tying strings to their long abdomens, turn them loose amid laughter and cries. It was this easy conquest of the myriad-eyed monsters that aroused their wild mirth as the men approached.

The mothers of these gamins were burning incense-sticks in stone basins beside their doorways, and sometimes strips of red paper on which were written prayers. In the sampans and fishing boats, women were also making propitiatory offerings—the boat’s prow serving as an altar. In one place on the river bank, a party of old leathery boatwomen chattered garrulously over a stone slab on which were placed a row of bowls containing rice, fowls, sweets and wine. Near by stood a large paper boat and a basket of miniature boats. One of these old women took two pieces of wood shaped like an half pear and engraved with a number of characters. These she tossed into the air so that they fell before the stone slab. Five times were the symbols cast, then the old women launched the bright-hued paper-boat and set fire to the basket of small boats. The smoke ascended in a straight, unwavering column.

Standing by the water’s edge, the older man continued to look intently down the river; neither noticing the children at play nor the prayers ascending from the thresholds, nor the offerings of the boatwomen to the gods of the winds and waters.

Suddenly a breathless expectancy fell upon those that were waiting and upon those that were sending their prayers heavenward in fragrant smoke.

Far away, somewhere to the east and south, came a gentle murmur. At this sound some crowded into their houses; others came forth. Only the children did not heed this murmur, which at times became a moan to cease a sigh. The people on the water front and along the eastern rim of the suburbs peered over the rice-fields toward Lung Mun and down the river to where it broadened out into a vast expanse of yellow waters. What they saw filled them with terror.

Across the eastern horizon opened an enormous crack. Many looked into it for an instant then ran and hid themselves in their hovels while those that remained shuddered. This abyss into which they looked commenced several degrees above the horizon; the bottom black, the top ashen; the river, bearing on its mighty current the boatwomen’s fragile offering, disappeared into it.

The crack widened. Awestricken, the people crowded together on the suburb’s edge and water front to watch it open.

The thin blue stems of sandalwood smoke, ascending from each doorway shrine, wavered.

The sky became overcast.

Suddenly the crowd swayed: backward, forward, backward, then scrambling, vanished—a drop of rain had fallen.

For a moment there was twilight, which was ghastly—then night, which was impenetrable.

A gust blew in from the sea and it was like a blast from a furnace. This sirocco that came from the ocean was the first breath of the typhoon.

The elder seizing his companion by the arm pulled him along the narrow streets toward the city. In the blackness they could see nothing but the dying embers of sandalwood dully glowing in spectral clusters by each threshold. These red, weird eyes peering out into the darkness blinked and grinned joyously. They were friendly with the hot wind and the harder it blew and the more they winked the more they coaxed the two men along the tunnel-like streets.

Suddenly the wind ceased and rain began to fall slowly in great drops. One by one the lights of the doorways went out. By their glow it had been possible to distinguish the alignment of the houses, but now what lay before them was cavernous. They were in a black labyrinth of winding streets: some leading into the river, while in the floors of others were wells; some extended a few feet, then ended. Familiar as the older man was with these suburbs, he stumbled along uncertain; the youth lagged. Both were stifling, for the scorching wind had started again with increasing severity, causing them to cover their faces with their silken sleeves.

There are winds that freeze, winds that burn, winds that tear and cut, but this wind that precedes the typhoon, chokes. It fills a man’s nostrils with so much burning air that he gasps for breath; he staggers, sometimes blood oozes from the eyes and ears, he strikes at the wind, claws the air, starts to run, stumbles and falls to the earth. Skeletons have been found with skulls clasped round in bony arms—strangled by this breath of the iron whirlwind.

The older man, aroused to the danger, stopped, and pounding on a door begged for admittance. There was no answer, and they crouched together on the threshold.

Presently the wind began to hesitate, to ebb, then it became quiet. But as they hurried along the black street a sound like a cough fell upon their ears, distant, piteous, wind-torn. They listened, and what they heard was terrible—the muttering of a typhoon.

Perhaps if the howl of a hell were known, the muttering of the typhoon, though dulled by distance, might be compared to it. As the Great Wind approaches this muttering grows louder and louder until it becomes a gigantic gibber; when at hand, the heavens are filled with multitudinous screams, howls, laughter, moans, and shrieks—a stir of sounds that is frightful.

The outer whirlwind now seized the men. Sometimes they were picked up by its clutching fingers and hurled forward; again they tried to move and could not; reaching out to see what opposed them they felt nothing; turning a corner they were often thrown against a wall and glued there as flies.

They had made but a short way in their struggle when the blackness began to lighten and become livid. Everywhere shone a ghastly glimmer, which was more impenetrable than the black night. With this light the wind and rain increased in violence.

Suddenly out of the livid blackness a flame darted: for a moment there was silent hesitancy, then the heavens burst into a conflagration. The typhoon was upon them. Floods now fell from burning clouds and tongues of fire spat out torrents.

In time, the thick mud walls of the surrounding houses began to collapse, undermined by the water tearing along the narrow streets. Sometimes a wall fell outward and the lightning showed terrified families crouching upon the floor; when it flared again there was often only a pile of brick, a heap of shattered tiles.

Thus they were driven from the shelter of one doorway to another and as the houses began to fall more frequently, they were kept in the middle of the streets breasting the storm with that strength remained to them.

The older man, dragging the youth along by the arm, struggled in the direction of the great city wall under whose sheltering corners they could alone find safety. But to get out of this suburban labyrinth was difficult, doubtful, since its windings were becoming more choked and impassable by the debris of falling houses. Sometimes they made their way forward only to find the street blocked and themselves exposed to the full swish of the storm. They retreated, but eventually their rear was also choked with houses that had fallen after they had passed and which formed just such a barricade as had turned them back. Hemmed in with houses falling first on one side, then on the other, they stumbled backward and forward in a continually narrowing space. At any moment an overhanging wall might crash into the street and then it would be empty.

No one can hope to wholly describe a typhoon, that great wind, which is to the cyclone of the American plains what the tornado is to a little whirlwind adrift down a dusty road. Slaughter as well as destruction marks its path, for the typhoon is made up of flames and floods as it is of winds, and what escapes death or ruin from its cyclonic breath is devoured by its fires or swept away by its torrents. No one hopes in a typhoon, and men flee but a little way from it.

Nothing is more frightful than this iron whirlwind, nothing more wonderful. It has the cunning brutality of the inanimate and its treachery; the bloodthirstiness of some gigantic beast, the grandeur of God. It is horrible, yet sublime.

This monster of nature is born somewhere out of the huge womb of the South Pacific, upon whose bosom it strays aimlessly and recklessly about, romping, wrestling, growing, until it gets into a temper and buffets its mother, the sea. Becoming cyclopean, it spits at heaven—petulant it departs.

Like a loosened monster it allows itself every liberty, and wanders with the greatest ease in any path. It sucks up the sea and snatches lightning from the clouds; it fills its belly with floods and its breast with fire. Headlong it falls upon every obstacle; ships become as dust motes in its breath. It devours towns and babies with the same ease, the same glee. It laughs and screeches simultaneously. It is full of joy and rage at the same time and its joy is the more terrible. Sometimes it gets into traps and difficulties from which it can scarcely extricate itself; then it becomes frantic, shrieks, lingers and mutilates.

But in spite of all this gyratory brutality, this iron-toothed monarch of all winds cannot ravage far from the sea, though in its blind rage it never hesitates. Falling upon the coast it hurls ships into rice fields or upon hillsides; the sea front it covers with wrecks; fishing fleets are crunched into splinters and towns are strewn about as picked bones.

So the two struggled feebly against this monster backward and forward in the midst of falling houses, until finally, bruised and bleeding, they tottered into an open court surrounded by high massive walls. Near the centre of the court stood a low crucifix, a tub, and two black stones. Against the windward wall was built an open shed, and into this beyond the crucifix they tottered and lay exhausted, while the typhoon raged and destroyed around them. The lightning burned steadily and the noises, which once muttered and cried about them, were lost in the terrifying grind of the iron wind; a wind that picked up great logs like rice straws, and sometimes sent rice straws with such force that they pierced wood as steel needles—a wind that in its antics screamed, and in its butchery laughed.

The two men under the shed lay still, apparently oblivious to the storm wrack until the older man rose to his knees and began to feel around for his companion. Beside him, lit by the lurid glare from without, were a number of headless corpses, and among these lay the youth.

“Where are we?” he asked meditatively when the older man had aroused him.

“In the Execution Grounds.”

“What are these?”

“Corpses.”

“Ah! their souls may now be with God.”

“Or in Hell.”

The storm was abating; the moans and cries from the heavens ceased; the lightning grew less violent. Suddenly all became an absolute calm and the men crept out from among the corpses under the shed.

A faint, uncertain light glimmered in the darkness above them; enormous black masses of clouds could be seen rolling close to the earth, but directly overhead was a circle of clear sky, darkly blue, and almost in its very centre shone a star of marvellous brilliancy. The youth gazed up at it in gratitude.

“It is the Eye of God.”

The elder also regarded the star, but said nothing.

“Let us go,” said the youth, “the storm has ended.”

“Not while the Eye of God is in the heavens.”

For some time they stood still and silent, watching the low black clouds roll around the clear circle of sky.

“What is that?” asked the youth thoughtfully, pointing to the low crucifix, the tub and the black stones showing dimly under the pale light that came from the Eye of God overhead.

“Lingchee,” growled the older man; “on that an adulteress salutes the world and passes on.”

For a long time both looked meditatively yet intently at the low crucifix, the tub and the black stones beside it.

“They tie her naked upon it,” growled the elder, more to himself than to the youth, “and then cut her into pieces. The first three cuts are called the strokes of mercy, and are no doubt dedicated to the many-handed goddess. The first stroke the executioner draws his knife across the brow and a fold of skin drops over the eyes, which is merciful, for it shuts out the sneering faces around her.”

The elder, looking up, saw that the Eye of God no longer shone in the heavens. Above and around them fell unfathomable darkness.

“Then the ears are cut off, which is also merciful, for jeers are no longer heard.”

A wolfish giggle came from the abyss about them; a drop of rain fell and their wet garments flapped heavily.

“Her tongue is cut out next,” continued the growl in the darkness, “and this is the crowning stroke of mercy, for it stops her piteous cries.”

Again came an interrupting roar, low and sullen. The typhoon was near at hand but the older man raised his voice above the distant roar.

“Then they cut off her breast, where——”

Gnashing, grinding, the iron-toothed wind fell again upon the hapless suburbs, revolving in the opposite direction. It is what sailors call the return storm, when its cyclonic revolutions are reversed and the typhoon returns to complete its devastation. Going, the typhoon is a monster; returning, it is in addition, a maniac. What it has failed to destroy, it returns to mangle. The terrible winds now came from the northwest through the open side of the court, and the two men were no longer protected. The shed that had sheltered them was shattered by the first returning blast. Helpless and bleeding they were hurled together with the headless corpses into a corner of the court, making altogether a hideous pile but wherein the cadavers protected them from the debris that was hurled into the corner. It often happens that in these storms the dead succour the living.

The typhoon continued to shriek and to laugh triumphantly in the black and fiery abyss overhead. It was as if hell had been turned upside down and out of its vast chasm its green fires were being poured and all those bruised noises that are said to resound there.

The typhoon was making its departure, which is not less terrible than its coming. Screaming, hovering and hastening it makes its retreat; mangling what it has heretofore destroyed. In time it weakens and begins to linger, then exhausted it hesitates, stops, and whispers. Frenzied, it again wanders uncontrollably about; revolving always in the same circle and moving whimsically hither and thither until its strength is gradually expended. Quivering, shuddering, whimpering, it at last disappears again into the mother sea—a prodigal returned.