Part 15

In the evening dinner with the mandarin, where the commandant of the French post, the prince, two or three notables, and one of my "confrères," a member of the Academy of China,--a mandarin with a sapphire button,--are the guests. Seated in heavy square arm-chairs, there are six or seven of us around a table decorated with small, exquisite, and unusual bits of old porcelain, so tiny as to seem to be part of a doll service. Red candles in high copper chandeliers give us our light.

This very morning the entire province had orders to leave off the winter head-dress and to put on the summer one,--a conical affair, resembling a lamp-shade, from which fall tufts of reddish horse-hair or peacock's or crow's feathers, according to the rank of the wearer. And since it is the style to wear them at dinner, hats of this description make grotesque figures of the guests.

As for the ladies of the house, they, alas, remain invisible, and it would be the worst possible breach of good form to ask for them or to refer to them in any way. It is well known that a Chinaman compelled to speak of his wife must refer to her in an indirect way, using, whenever possible, a qualifying term, devoid of all compliment, as, for example, "my offensive" or "my nauseating" wife.

The dinner begins with preserved prunellas and a great variety of dainty sweetmeats, which are eaten with little chop-sticks. The mandarin makes excuses for not offering me sea-swallows' nests, but Y-Tchou is so far from the coast that it is difficult to secure what one would like. But to make up for this lack, there is a dish of sharks' fins, another of the bladder of the sperm whale, another still of hinds' nerves, besides a ragout of water-lily roots with shrimps' eggs.

The inevitable odor of opium and musk mingled with the flavor of strange sauces pervades the room, which is white with a black ceiling. Its walls are decorated with water-colors on long strips of precious yellow paper, containing representations of animals or of huge flowers. A score of servants flock about us with the same sort of head-dress as their masters, and clad in beautiful silk gowns with velvet corselets. At my right my "confrère" of the Chinese Academy discourses to me of another world. He is old and quite withered-looking from the abuse of the fatal drug; his small face, shrivelled to a mere nothing, is obliterated by his conical hat and by his big blue goggles.

"Is it true," he inquires, "that the Middle Empire occupies the top of the territorial globe, and that Europe hangs on one side at an uncomfortable angle?"

It appears that he has at the ends of his fingers more than forty thousand characters in writing, and that he is able to improvise sweet poetry on any subject you may choose. From time to time I am aghast at the sight of his skeleton-like arm emerging from sleeves like pagodas, and stretching out toward some dish. His object is to secure with his own two-tined fork some choice morsel for me, which compels me to resort to perpetual and difficult jugglery in order not to have to eat the things.

After several preposterous light dishes, boned ducks appear, then a copious variety of viands succeed one another until the guests announce that they really have had enough. Then they bring opium pipes and cigarettes, and soon it is time to take a palanquin for the nocturnal festival they are arranging for me.

Outside, in the long avenue of porticoes, under the starry sky, all the servants of the Yamen await us with big paper lanterns, painted with bats and chimæras. A hundred friendly Boxers are also there, holding torches to light us better. Each of us gets into a palanquin, and the bearers trot off with us, while flaming torches run along beside us, and gongs, also running, begin the noise of battle at the head of our procession.

By the light of dancing torches we file rapidly past the open stalls, past the groups of natives assembled to watch us, past the grimacing monsters ranged along our route.

At the rear of an immense court stands a new building, where by the light of the torches we read the astonishing inscription, "Parisiana of Y-Tchou." "Parisiana" in this ultra-Chinese town, which until the previous autumn had never seen a European approach its walls! Our bearers stop there, and we find it is a theatre improvised this winter by our sixty soldiers to help pass away the glacial evenings.

I had promised to assist at a gala performance given for me by these grown-up children this evening. And of all the charming receptions that have been tendered me here and there all over the world, none has moved me more than this one arranged by a few soldiers exiled in a lost corner of China. Their reserved smiles of welcome, the few words one of them undertook to say for all, were more touching than any banquet or formal address, and I was glad to press the hands of the brave soldiers who dared not offer them.

In order that I might have a souvenir of their evening's hospitality at Y-Tchou, they got up a subscription and presented me with a very local gift,--one of those red silk parasols with long falling draperies, which it is the custom in China to carry in front of men of mark. And cumbrous as the thing is, even when folded, it is needless to say that I shall take it with great care to France.

They next gave me an illustrated programme, on which the name of each actor figured, followed by a pompous title,--"Monsieur the soldier so-and-so of the Comédie-Française," or "Monsieur the corporal so-and-so of the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt." We take our places. It is a real theatre that they have made, with a raised stage, scenery, and a curtain.

In the Chinese arm-chairs, which are placed in the first row, their captain is seated next to me; then come the mandarin, the prince of the blood, and two or three other notables, with long queues. Behind us are the under-officers and the soldiers; several yellow babies in ceremonial toilettes mingle familiarly with them, even climbing up on their knees. They are pupils from their school. For they have started a school, like the one at Laï-Chou-Chien, to teach French to the children of the neighborhood. A sergeant presented me to an inimitable youngster of not more than six, dressed for the occasion in a beautiful gown, his little short, thick queue tied with red silk, who recited for me the beginning of "Maître corbeau sur un arbre perché," in a deep voice, rolling his eyes to the ceiling the while.

Three taps and the curtain rises. First comes a farce, by I know not whom, but certainly much retouched by themselves with an unexpected turn of wit which is irresistible. The ladies, the mothers-in-law, with false hair made of oakum, are indescribable. Then more comic scenes and songs from the "Black Cat." The Chinese guests on their throne-like chairs remain as impassive as the Buddhas of the pagodas. What do their Asiatic brains make of all this French gaiety?

Before the last numbers on the programme are over the sudden thundering of gongs is heard outside, the playing of citherns, and the clashing of cymbals, and of all the rest of the iron instruments of China. It is the prelude to the fête which the mandarin is to give me, which is to take place in the courtyard of the army quarters, and in which our soldiers naturally are to take part.

A profusion of lanterns illumines the court, together with the flaming torches of a hundred Boxers. First there is a stilt dance, then follow all the gymnastic societies of the adjoining district in their specialties. Little country boys twelve years old, costumed like lords of old dynasties, have a sham battle, flourishing their swords and jumping about like kittens, prodigies of quickness and lightness. Then come the young men of another village, who throw off their garments and begin to twirl pitchforks all around their naked bodies; by a twist of the wrist or by an imperceptible movement of the foot they are turned so rapidly that very soon they are no longer forks to our eyes, but a row of endless serpents about the breasts of the men. Then suddenly, more deftly than in the best managed circus, a horizontal bar is placed before us, and acrobats, naked to the waist, and superbly muscular, give a performance. They belong to the mandarin, and are the very men who just now served us at the table in beautiful silken robes.

It all ended with very long and noisy fireworks. When the pieces attached to invisible bamboo stems exploded in the air, delicate and luminous paper pagodas floated off across the starry sky, fabrics of a Chinese dream, trembling, imponderable, which suddenly took fire and disappeared in smoke.

* * * * *

It is late when we return through the little dark streets, now all asleep. Our bearers trot along, escorted by a thousand dancing lights from torches and lanterns.

Toward midnight I am at last alone, in the depths of the Yamen, in my separate dwelling, the avenue leading to it guarded by motionless, crouching beasts. On my centre-table they have placed a luncheon of all the kinds of cakes known to China. Trees in fruit, in flower, and without leaves, decorate my small tables,--dwarf trees, of course, grown in porcelain jars, and so tortured as to become unnatural. A little pear-tree has assumed the regular form of a lyre composed of white blossoms; a small peach-tree resembles a crown made of pink flowers. Everything in my room, except these fresh spring plants, is old, warped, worm-eaten, and at the holes in a ceiling that was once white appear the faces of innumerable rats, whose eyes follow me about the room. As soon as I put out my light and lie down in my great bed with carvings representing horrible animals, I hear all these rats come down, move about among the fine porcelains, and gnaw at my cakes. Then from out the more and more profound stillness of my surroundings the night watchmen with muffled steps begin discreetly to use their castanets.

SUNDAY, April 28.

An early morning walk among the silver-sculptors of Y-Tchou, then through a quite dead part of the town to an antique pagoda half crumbled away, which stands among some phantom trees of which little but the bark is left. Along its galleries the tortures of the Buddhist hell are depicted; several hundred life-sized persons carved in wood filled with worm-holes, are fighting with devils who are tearing them to pieces or burning them alive.

* * * * *

At nine o'clock I mount my horse and start off with my men, in order to cover before noon the fifteen or eighteen kilometres which still separate me from the mysterious burial-places of the emperors; for we return to Y-Tchou for the night, and set off again to-morrow on the road to Pekin.

We go out at the gate opposite the one we entered yesterday. Nowhere else have we seen so many monsters as in this ancient town; their great sneering faces appear on all sides out of the ground, where time has almost buried them. A few entire figures may be seen crouching on their pedestals, guarding the approaches to the granite bridges or ranged in rows around the squares.

As we leave the town, we pass a poor-looking pagoda on whose walls hang cages containing human heads recently cut off. And then we find ourselves once more in the silent fields under the burning sun.

The prince accompanies us, riding a Mongolian colt as rough-coated as a spaniel. His rose-colored silks and velvet foot-gear form a striking contrast to our rough costumes and dusty boots, and he leaves behind him a trail of musk.

IV

The country slopes gently toward the range of Mongolian mountains, which, though still some distance ahead of us, is now growing rapidly in height. Trees are more and more frequent, grass grows naturally here and there, and we have left the dreary ashy soil.

Near by there are a few pointed-topped hills, queerly shaped, with occasionally an old tower perched on the summit,--the ten or twelve storied kind, which at once give the landscape a Chinese look, with superimposed roofs, curved up like dogs' ears, at the corners, with an Æolian harp at each end.

The air is growing purer; the cloud of dust is left behind as we approach the unquestionably privileged region which has been selected for the repose of the celestial emperors and empresses.

We stop at a village, after about a dozen kilometres, to take breakfast with a great prince of much higher rank than the one who rides with us. He is a direct uncle of the Emperor, in disgrace with the Empress, whose favorite he has been, and now entrusted with the guardianship of the tombs. As he is in deep mourning, he is dressed in cotton like the poor, and yet does not resemble them. He makes excuses for receiving us in a dilapidated old house, his own Yamen having been burned by the Germans, and offers us a very Chinese breakfast, where reappear the sharks' wings and hinds' nerves. The flat-faced peasants of the neighborhood peer at us in the meantime through the numerous holes in the rice-paper window-panes.

We remount at once, after the last cup of tea, to visit the tombs toward which we have been journeying for three days, and which are now very near. My confrère of the Pekin Academy, with his big, round spectacles and his little bird-like body completely lost in his beautiful silken robes, has rejoined us, and slowly follows along upon a mule.

A more and more solitary country. No more villages, no more fields! The road winds along among the hills,--which are covered with grass and flowers,--surprising and enchanting our unaccustomed eyes. It seems like a glimpse of Eden after the dusty-gray China we have come through, where the only green thing was the wheat. The perpetual dust of Petchili has been left behind; but on the plain below we still perceive it, like a fog from which we have escaped.

We continue to mount, and soon arrive at the first spurs of the Mongolian range. Here behind a wall of earth we find an immense Tartar camp, at least two thousand men, armed with lances, bows, and arrows, guard of honor of the defunct rulers.

Once more we see a clear horizon, the very memory of which had faded. It seems as though these Mongolian mountains suddenly huddled together as though they had all pressed forward; very rocky they are, with strange outlines, peaks like turrets or pagoda-towers rising above us,--all of a beautiful purple iris effect.

Ahead of us we begin to see on all sides wooded valleys and forests of cedar. True, they are artificial forests, although very old,--planted centuries ago for this funeral park, covering an area twenty miles in circumference, where four Tartar emperors sleep.

We enter this silent, shadowy place, astonished to find that, contrary to Chinese custom, it is surrounded by no wall. No doubt it was felt that this isolated spot would be sufficiently protected by the terror inspired by the shades of the emperors, as well as by a general edict of death promulgated in advance against any one who dared to cultivate a bit of the ground or even sow a seed.

It is the sacred wood _par excellence_, with all its retirement and its mystery. What marvellous poets of the dead the Chinese are, to be able to prepare them such dwelling-places!

Here in the shadows one is tempted to speak low, as under the roof of a temple; one feels it a profanity for the horses to trample down the turf,--a carpet of fine grass and blossoms, venerated for ages past, and apparently never disturbed. The great cedars and the hundred-year-old thuyas, scattered over the hills and in the valleys, are separated by open spaces where brushwood grows; and under the colonnade formed by their massive trunks there is nothing but short grass, exquisite tiny flowers, and moss and lichens.

The dust that obscures the sky on the plains apparently never reaches this chosen spot, for the magnificent green of the trees is nowhere dimmed. In this superb solitude, which men have created here and dedicated to the shades of their masters, the distance disclosed to us as our road takes us past some clearing or up some height is of an absolute limpidity. A light as from Paradise falls upon us from a heaven profoundly blue, streaked with tiny clouds, rose-gray like turtle-doves. At such moments one gets a glimpse of splendid distant golden-yellow roofs rising amongst sombre branches, like the palace of the Sleeping Beauty.

Not a soul in all this shaded road. The silence of the desert! Only occasionally the croaking of a raven,--too funereal a bird, it seems, for the calm enchantment of this place, where Death is compelled, before entering, to lay aside its horror and to become simply the magician of unending rest.

In some places the trees form avenues which are finally lost to sight in the green dusk. Elsewhere they have been planted without design, and seem to have grown of their own accord and to form a natural forest. All the details recall the fact that the place is magnificent, imperial, sacred; the smallest bridge, thrown over a stream which crosses the road, is of white marble of rare design, covered with beautiful carvings; an heraldic beast, crouching in the shadow, menaces us with a ferocious smile as we pass by, or a marble obelisk surrounded by five-clawed dragons rises unexpectedly in its snowy whiteness, outlined against the dark background of the cedars.

In this wood, twenty miles in circumference, lie the bodies of but four emperors; that of the Empress Regent, whose tomb was long since begun, will be added as well as her son's, the young Emperor, who has had his chosen place marked with a stele of gray marble.[4] And that is all. Other sovereigns, past or to be, sleep, or will sleep, elsewhere, in other Edens, as vast and as wonderfully arranged. Immense space is required for the body of a Son of Heaven, and immense solitary silence must reign round about it.

The arrangement of these tombs is regulated by unchangeable plans, which date back to old extinguished dynasties. They are all alike, recalling those of the Ming emperors, which antedate them by several centuries, and whose ruins have been for a long time the object of one of the excursions permitted to European travellers.

One invariably approaches by a cut in the sombre forest, half a mile in length, which has been so planned by the artists of the past that it opens, like the doors of a magnificent stage-setting, upon some incomparable background such as a particularly high mountain, abrupt and bold, or a mass of rock presenting one of those anomalies of form and color that the Chinese everywhere seek.

Invariably, also, the avenue begins with great triumphal arches of white marble, which are, needless to say, surmounted by monsters bristling with horns and claws.

In the case of the ancestor of the present Emperor, who receives to-day our first visit, these entrance arches appear unexpectedly in the heart of the forest, their bases entangled with wild bindweed. They seem to have shot up, at the rubbing of an enchanter's magic ring, out of what appears to be virgin soil, so covered is it with moss and with the rare delicate little plants which nothing disturbs, and which grow only in places that have long been quiet and respected by man.

Next come some marble bridges with semicircular arches; there are three bridges exactly alike, for each time an emperor passes, dead or alive, the middle bridge is reserved for him alone. The architects of the tombs were careful to have the avenue crossed several times by artificial streams, in order to have an occasion for spanning them with these charming curves of everlasting white. On each rail of the bridge there is an intertwining of imperial fancies. The sloping pavement is white and slippery, and completely framed in grass, which pushes through and flourishes in all its joinings.

The crossing is dangerously slippery for our horses, whose steps resound mournfully on the marble; the sudden noise we make in the stillness is almost a source of embarrassment to us, making us feel as though our coming had disturbed in an unseemly manner the composure of the necropolis. With the exception of ourselves and a few ravens in the trees, nothing moves and nothing lives in all the immensity of this memorial park.

Beyond the three arched bridges the avenue leads to the first temple, with a yellow enamelled roof, which seems to bar our way. At the four corners of the open space it occupies, rise four rostral columns made of marble, white as ivory,--admirable monoliths, with a crouching animal at the top of each one, similar to those enthroned on the obelisks in front of the palace at Pekin,--a sort of slender jackal, with long, erect ears, upturned eyes, and a mouth open as if howling to heaven. This first temple contains nothing but three giant stele, resting on marble turtles as large as leviathans. They recount the glory of a defunct emperor; the first is inscribed in the Tartar language, the second in Chinese, the third in Manchou.

Beyond this temple of stele the avenue is prolonged in the same direction for an indefinite length, very majestic with its two walls of black-green cedars, and its carpet of grass, flowers, and moss, which looks as though it were never trampled upon. All the avenues in these woods are always thus deserted, always silent, for the Chinese come here only at rare intervals, in solemn, respectful processions to perform their funeral rites. And it is the air of desertion in the midst of splendor which is the great charm of this place, unique in all the world.

When the Allies have left China, this park of tombs, open to us for a single moment, will be once more impenetrable for how long we do not know; perhaps until another invasion, which may cause the venerable yellow Colossus to crumble away,--unless, indeed, it awakes from its slumber of a thousand years; for the Colossus is still capable of spreading terror, and of arming itself for a revenge of which one dares not think--_Mon Dieu!_ the day when China, in the place of its small regiments of mercenaries and bandits, shall arm in mass for a supreme revolt its millions of young peasants such as I have recently seen, sober, cruel, spare, muscular, accustomed to every sort of physical exercise, and defiant of death, what a terrifying army it will have, if modern instruments of destruction are placed in their hands! On reflection, it seems as though certain of the Allies have been rather rash to have sown here so many seeds of hatred, and to have created so much desire for vengeance.