Just as the pagoda expresses, by its system of courts and buildings,
the extent and the dimensions of Space; so the tower symbolizes Height.
Poised against the sky, it becomes the scale of it. The seven octagonal
stories are a plan of the seven mystic heavens. The architect has
narrowed their corners and lifted their borders with skill. Each story
casts its own shadow below it. At every angle of every roof a bell
is attached, and beside it hangs the clapper with which to strike it.
Their metallic syllables are the mysterious voice of each Heaven, and
their unuttered sound hangs suspended like a drop.
I have nothing more to say of the pagoda. I do not know its name.
THE CITY AT NIGHT
It is raining softly. The night has come. The policeman takes the
lead and turns to the left, ceasing his talk of the time when, as
a kitchen-boy in the invading army, he saw his Major installed in
the sanctuary of the “God of Long Life.” The road that we follow is
mysterious. By a series of alleys, of passages, stairs, and doorways,
we come out in the court of the temple, where buildings with clawlike
copings and hornlike peaks make a black frame to the night sky. A
smoldering fire flickers from the dark doorway. We penetrate the
blackness of the hall.
The cave is filled with incense, glowing with red light. One cannot
see the ceiling. A wooden grille separates the idol from his clients,
and from the table of offerings, where garlands of fruit and bowls of
food are deposited. The bearded face of a giant image can be vaguely
distinguished. The priests are dining, seated about a round table.
Against the wall is a drum as enormous as a tun, and a great gong in
the form of the ace of spades. Two red tapers, like square columns,
lose themselves in the smoke and the night, where vague pennants float.
Onward!
The narrow tangle of streets, where we are involved in the midst of
a shadowy crowd, is lit only by the deep open booths which border
it. These are the work-rooms of carpenters, engravers; the shops of
tailors, shoemakers, and venders of fur. From innumerable kitchens,
behind the display of bowls of noodles and soup, the sound of frying
escapes. In a dark recess some woman attends a crying child. Among
stacked-up coffins is the gleam of a pipe. A lamp, a sidewise flicker,
shows strange medleys. At the street corners, at the bends of heavy
little stone bridges, in niches behind iron bars, dwarfish idols can be
seen between two red candles. After a long progress under the rain, in
the darkness and filth, we find ourselves suddenly in a yellow blind
alley which a big lantern lights with a brutal flare. Color of blood,
color of pestilence, the high walls of the dungeon where we are have
been daubed with an ocher so red that it seems of itself to irradiate
light. The door at our left is simply a round hole.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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