Nature herself has prepared the materials. The hand of Time, the frost, the rain, wear away, work at the rock; perforating it, gashing it, probing it with a searching finger. Faces, animals, skeletons, hands, shells, bodies without heads, petrified wood like a congealed mass of broken figures, mingled with leaves and fishes; Chinese art seizes all these strange objects, imitates them, and arranges them with an ingenious industry. This garden represents a mountain cleft by a precipice, to which steep paths give access. Its feet bathe in a little lake half covered with green scum, where a zigzag bridge completes the bias outline. Built upon a foundation of pink granite piles, the tea-house mirrors in the greenish black waters of the basin its soaring double roofs, which seem to lift it from the earth like outspread wings. Below, driven straight into the earth like iron candlesticks, the stripped trees bar the sky, their giant stature dominating the garden. I wander among the stones by a long labyrinth whose windings and turnings, ascents and evasions, amplify and complicate the scene, simulating the mazes of a dream around the lake and the mountain. Finally I attain the kiosk on the summit. The garden seems to sink below me like a valley full of temples and pavilions, and among the trees appears the poem of the roofs. They are high and low, detached and massed, elongated like a pediment or swelling like a bell. They are surmounted with ornamental friezes decorated with centipedes and fishes. At the intersections of their ridges the peaks display stags, storks, altars, vases, and wingèd pomegranates--all symbolic. The roofs, lifted up at the corners like arms which hold up a too ample robe, have a creamy whiteness or the blackness of soot yellowed and sodden. The air is green, as when one looks through old window-glass. The other slope brings us before the great pavilion. The descent winds slowly toward the lake by irregular steps leading to other surprises. Coming out of an alley, I see pointing in disorder toward the sky five or six horns of a roof whose building is hidden from me. Nothing could paint the drunken toss of these fairy prows, the proud elegance of these flowering stalks, holding up a lily to the envious clouds. Bourgeoning with this flower, the strong framework lifts itself like a branch that one lets spring. I reach the border of the pond where the stalks of dead lotus flowers lie across the still waters. The silence is as profound as the depth of a winter forest. This harmonious place was built for the pleasure of the members of a Syndicate of Commerce in beans and rice, who doubtless come here in the spring nights to drink tea and watch the shore glimmer under the moon. The other garden is more singular.