On narrow benches, their heads helmed with flowers and pearls, clothed in wide blouses of silk and full embroidered trousers, motionless, with their hands on their knees, the prostitutes wait in the street like beasts at a fair, in the pell-mell and the dust of passers-by. Beside their mothers and dressed like them, also motionless, little girls are seated on the same bench. Behind, a flare of petrol lights the opening to the stairway. I go. And I carry the memory of a life congested, naïve, restless; of a city at the same time open and crowded, a single house with a multifold family. I have seen the city of other days, when, free of modern influences, men swarmed in an artless disorder; in fact it is the fascination of all the past that I am leaving, when, issuing out of the double gate in the hurly-burly of wheelbarrows and litters, in the midst of lepers and epileptics, I see the electric lights of the Concession shine. GARDENS It is half-past three: white mourning.[A] The sky is veiled as if with white linen. The air is moist and raw. I go into the city. I am looking for gardens. I walk in a black gravy. Along the ditch whose crumbling border I follow, the odor is so strong that it is like an explosive. There is the smell of oil, garlic, filth, ashes, opium, and offal. I walk amid a free and easy people who are shod with thick buskins or sandals of straw, wearing long hoods or skullcaps of felt, their silk or linen trousers tucked into leggings. The wall winds and undulates, and its coping, an arrangement of bricks and open-work tiles, imitates the back and body of a crawling dragon. A sort of head terminates it, from which floats a cloud of smoke. This is the place. I knock mysteriously at a little black door which opens. Under the overhanging roofs I cross a succession of vestibules and narrow corridors. I am in a strange place. It is a garden of stones.... Like the ancient Italian and French designers, the Chinese have understood that a garden, from the fact of its inclosure, must be complete in itself and harmonious in all its parts. Only so will nature adapt herself to our moods, and only so, by a subtle harmony, will the master feel at home wherever he looks. Just as a landscape does not consist simply of its grass and the color of its foliage, but is distinguished by its outlines and the slope of the ground, so the Chinese literally construct their gardens with stones. They are sculptors instead of painters. Because it is susceptible of elevation and depth, of contours and reliefs, through the variety of its planes and surfaces, stone seems to them a more suitable medium for creating a background for Man than are plants, which they reduce to their normal place of decoration and ornament.