Then the old man, having kissed the still warm bronze, struck it powerfully with his mallet; and so lively was the invasion of joy at the perfection he heard, and the victory of its magnificence, that his heart languished within him; and, sinking upon his knees, he could not keep from dying. Since then, and since the day when a city was born of its widespread summons, the metal has cracked and gives only a dying echo of its former self. But the wise, with a vigilant heart, still hear at the break of day, when a faint, cold wind comes from skies the color of apricots and of hop-flowers, the first bell--in the celestial spaces--and, at the somber set of sun, the second bell--in the depths of the immense and muddy Kiang. THE TOMB On the pediment of the funereal portal I read an order to alight. On my right are some broken statues in the reeds, and an inscription on a formidable pillar of black granite gives with wearisome detail the laws relating to sepulchers; half obliterated by moss a threat forbids the breaking of vases, loud cries, or the spoiling of ceremonial basins. It is certainly later than two o’clock, because I see that the dim, round sun is already a third of the way down a dull and lurid sky. I can only mount straight onward, to survey the arrangement of the cemetery; and, preparing my heart, I start out on the road the funerals follow across this home of the dead, in itself lifeless. First come, one after another, two square mountains of brick. Their hollow centers open by four arches on the four points of the compass. The first of these halls is empty. In the second a giant tortoise of marble, so high that I can scarcely reach his mustached head with my hand, supports a panegyric column. “This is the porch and apprenticeship of the earth,” I thought. “Here Death halted between the double thresholds, and here the master of the world received supreme homage between the four horizons and the sky.” But scarcely have I gone out by the Northern door (it is not vainly that I leap this rivulet!) than I see open out before me the country of the shades. Forming an avenue of alternate couples, monstrous animals appear before me, facing each other, successively repeated kneeling and standing in pairs; rams, horses, unicorns, camels, elephants; until, at the turning where the last of the procession disappears, these enormous and ugly shapes loom out against the straggling grass. Further off are ranged civil and military mandarins. These stones are sent to ceremonial funerals in the place of animals and men; and, as the dead have crossed the threshold of life, it would not be suitable to give closer likenesses to such replicas.