They walked farther into the grove across little streams of clear water, paved with polished pebbles, over which hung an occasional graceful pavilion. Among the rocks were more sculptured figures. On a ledge across the stream, behind a pattern of branches, was a figure that particularly attracted her. Megan stopped to look at it, and the General suggested they rest for a moment. To have an uninterrupted view of the Buddha Megan sat down on a smooth low boulder and the General sat beside her. He offered her a cigarette and Megan took one, sitting with her elbows on her knees, her chin on her knuckles, entirely at ease now. The General watched her between soft puffs at his cigarette. Megan, smoking, was absorbed in the figure carved in the rock. The sun came out and a few leaf shadows wavered over it, breaking up the lines and surfaces. What was there about it, as in the faces carved in the caves, that had seemed not quite Chinese? It was a face serene and with the lowered eyelids of a man asleep, but one felt that this man dreamed and that in his dream he knew all the lost paradises, where love is the law, the beginning and the end. The Chinese do not dream such dreams. Even during the brief Buddhist domination they remained secretly and profoundly indifferent, insensible, to these intoxications of the spirit, and Buddhism passed, leaving them untroubled as though its shadow only had passed over them. Megan, raised to a higher point of sensitivity, felt that the General, looking at her, was aware to some extent of what she was thinking and that he was smiling a little ironically, saying to her in his mind, "See what we are capable of living through untouched. And how can you ever hope to change us?" She heard his inner laughter and with it the laughter of hundreds of small voices, shrill, thin, as notes of cicadas, rising all about her from tree, water, earth, hearth flame, the voices of the small gods, the ancient gods of China never abandoned, forever satisfying a people whose contemplations are all bounded by the earth and the sky, whose kitchens, markets, fields, temples and gardens, they fill with their aroma of homely poetry, their ceremony, their magic. The General laughed with them, and they, a little senile in triumph, laughed with the General. "You make me think such strange things," said Megan aloud. "I know," he replied. "You were thinking that you do not represent the first religious invasion we have lived through. And perhaps you are even wondering if you will be able to do more for us than the others did, yes, even with all that you are willing to give away with it in the way of kerosene and munitions and a thousand like commodities, tucked in like a coupon in a package of cigarettes, entitling one after so many to six plated silver spoons." But Megan did not feel that he spoke bitterly. He looked at her with a smile of pure banter.