Every solid door opens upon less than is shut out by its particular panels. Many, through progress in the occult, have gained Yamen, the solitary state, and the court which a great silence fills; but if any one, after attaining this degree, at the moment when his hand is poised for a blow on the drum offered to visitors, hears the sound of his name penetrating the distance like a muffled cry (because the spouse or the sons of the dead are shouting loudly into his left ear), and if he vanquishes his fatal languor long enough to draw away one or two steps from the doors just barely opening to his desire,--his soul will regain its body. But no melody of a name can rescue those who have taken the irretrievable step over the secret sill. Without doubt I am in such a realm, on the shallow stones of this somber pond which surrounds me; as, standing within its ornate frame, I taste forgetfulness and the secret of this taciturn garden. An ancient memory has not more windings or more secret passages than the road which has led me here, through a succession of courts, grottoes, and open corridors. The art of this restricted place is to hide its limits from me by bewildering me. Its undulant walls, which mount and descend, divide it into separate sections; and, while the tops of trees and the roofs of houses, showing through, seem to invite the guest to search out their secrets; these barriers, multiplying surprises and deceits in his path, lead him further away. Except for a wise dwarf with a skull like the belly of a gourd, or a pair of young storks surmounting its ornamental apex, the chalice of the roof shadows a hall not so deserted but that a half-consumed stick of incense still smokes there, and a forgotten flower fades. The princess and her old counselor have only just arisen from yonder seat and the greenish air is still full of the rustle of illustrious silk. Fabulous indeed is my habitation! I see, in these walls where the pierced copings seem to melt away, banks of clouds; and these fantastic windows are as masses of leaves confusedly seen through the rifts. The wind, leaving on each side curving streamers, gashes irregular breaches in the fog. Let me not gather the flower of the afternoon from any other garden than this, which I enter by a door in the outline of a vase, of a leaf, of a dragon’s smoking jaws, of the setting sun when its disk reaches the sea-line, or of the rising moon! THE RIVER From the vast and yellow river my eyes return to our leadsman crouching at the side of the boat. Turning the line in his fist with a regular motion, he sends the lead in full flight across the muddy waters.