He went out. He walked east. The air was cool and the sharp brittle rays of the stars made him feel as though he were on the verge of being more widely awake than ever man was before. Here were trees and a very broad moonlit street. Here, suddenly, was Peking. A great gate cast its mountainous tented shadow to his feet. The curves of the roofs above the gate were high and ample and optimistic. The moon shone through the deserted windows of the high guard-house. There were soldiers at the gate so Edward went no nearer to its arch. But he waded in its clean shadow upon the uneven dust of the street. He walked still east, along very narrow streets. There were no straight roofs at all; all the eaves turned up as if the roofs were of drooping dark silk with their hems slung to the stars, or as if the houses were dancing and swinging gay skirts. There was an open space; low trees splashed shadows on white dust and wet grass. Peking was not so tightly packed within its walls but that a wide space might be left in the angle of one corner of the walls, a space where goats and donkeys had their lodging. Beggars slept here too, but Edward’s tread on the dust did not wake them. The walls barred his way. They were new-looking walls, he thought, almost silver in the moonlight, the design of castellation fencing the outer rim was unbroken. But the guard-house on the corner of the wall looked forgotten and old. There was a brick slope which climbed to the top of the wall. Iron gates barred both the foot and the head of the slope, but the gates were easily climbed. Edward was on the broad weedy path that ran on the top of the wall. The seeds of flowers and tall grasses had accepted the wall as part of the soil of China. Edward went into the high beamed hall of the guard-house. The moonlight made strange and glorious broad spaces of its dusty floor; its dazzled windows looked out on naked moonlight. It was so full of silence that its old walls cracked. That corner of Peking was a watching corner. A little further on the dragons of the Observatory watched the stars. Great wild bucking dragons bore on their backs or between their claws huge secret instruments which, in the belief of men and dragons, prepare the way of the Lord and make his paths straight. The bronze dragons of the Peking Observatory are only a little junior to history, but Edward did not know that. He tried feebly to open the locked gate and then forgot and left the dragons, the spying and puritan dragons, holding their check on the wild and dancing stars. To the west Peking was like an enchanted forest in the milky half light. No house declared itself among the trees except the great insolent hotel which raised itself like a banner of unworthy victory over the quiet city. Beyond Peking, far away, were the Western Hills, their outline a wild tossing together of angles, their chequered surface broken by strange folds and scars.