If I permit a concrete, scientific reaction, I must acknowledge the
source to be a passing bug,--a giant bug,--related distantly to our
malodorous northern squash-bug, but emitting a scent as different as
orchids' breath from grocery garlic. But I accept this delicate
volatility as simply another pastel-soft sense-impression--as an
earnest of the worthy, smelly things of old jungles. There is no
breeze, no slightest shift of air-particles; yet down the gorge comes
this cloud,--a cloud unsensible except to nostrils,--eddying as if
swirling around the edges of leaves, riding on the air as gently as
the low, distant crooning of great, sleepy jungle doves.
With two senses so perfectly occupied, sight becomes superfluous and I
close my eyes. And straightway the scent and the murmur usurp my whole
mind with a vivid memory. I am still squatting, but in a dark,
fragrant room; and the murmur is still of doves; but the room is in
the cool, still heart of the Queen's Golden Monastery in northern
Burma, within storm-sound of Tibet, and the doves are perched among
the glitter and tinkling bells of the pagoda roofs. I am squatting
very quietly, for I am tired, after photographing carved peacocks and
junglefowl in the marvelous fretwork of the outer balconies, There
are idols all about me--or so it would appear to a missionary; for my
part, I can think only of the wonderful face of the old Lama who sits
near me, a face peaceful with the something for which most of us would
desert what we are doing, if by that we could attain it. Near him are
two young priests, sitting as motionless as the Buddha in front of
them.
After a half-hour of the strange thing that we call time, the Lama
speaks, very low and very; softly:
"The surface of the mirror is clouded with a breath."
Out of a long silence one of the neophytes replies, "The mirror can be
wiped clear."
Again the world becomes incense and doves,--in the silence and peace
of that monastery, it may have been a few minutes or a decade,--and
the second Tibetan whispers, "There is no need to wipe the mirror."
When I have left behind the world of inharmonious colors, of polluted
waters, of soot-stained walls and smoke-tinged air, the green of
jungle comes like a cooling bath of delicate tints and shades. I think
of all the green things I have loved--of malachite in matrix and
table-top; of jade, not factory-hewn baubles, but age-mellowed
signets, fashioned by lovers of their craft, and seasoned by the
toying yellow fingers of generations of forgotten Chinese
emperors--jade, as Dunsany would say, of the exact shade of the right
color. I think too, of dainty emerald scarves that are seen and lost
in a flash at a dance; of the air-cooled, living green of curling
breakers; of a lonely light that gleams to starboard of an unknown
passing vessel, and of the transparent green of northern lights that
flicker and play on winter nights high over the garish glare of
Broadway.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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