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PROLOGUE

THE TYPHOON

From the city of Yingching an old road runs northwestward to the mountains of Loh Fou—that indescribable mass of grandeur and mystery, in whose gorges unnumbered monasteries slumber, from whose peaks and cliffs temples gaze benignly down through the somnolent shadows upon the thoughtful progeny of Panku—the World-Chiseller. This slab-worn road, after it leaves the suburbs clustering around the East Gate of Yingching, follows right-obliquely across the rice-fields to the foot of the White Cloud Hills.

To the residents of Yingching these hills have always been a source of delight, and for uncounted ages multitudes have crowded at sunset the towers and pavilions of the city walls to watch their glens and slopes become veiled in a filtering of delicate shades—lilac, amethyst and violet, until, through a deep of purple, they vanish into night—a fluttering of gorgeous shadows.

Up over these hills the old road climbs laboriously until it disappears through a gorge of its own wearing. After crossing the southern slope it winds through deeply wooded ravines in whose 4alcoves Buddhist and Taoist monasteries sleep away the fretful ages of man, forming retreats for scholars, who come from Yingching, to escape in their brook-splashed groves the clatter and nagging of men.

This ancient highway struggles on through the White Cloud Hills, mutilated, uncertain; past the great monastery of Kingtai below the southern summits; past reproachful ruins in whose crumbling shadows solitary monks remain to propitiate the spirits of those that once dwelt in their cloisters; past the Silvery Rush Brook whose foam the banished statesman, Su Tungpa, compared, some centuries ago, to human greatness. Crawling, halting along its deep-worn way the old road gropes through gorges, over mountains, across torrents and under the splash of cataracts until it reaches the green, undulating plains of Tsang Tsing. Thence it goes straight through canebrakes, past villages and tombs, under orchards of lichee, past ruins hid beneath creepers and cities old and new.

Below the market-town of Chingkwo the ancient way crosses the Lung Mun River, and, entering the mountains of Loh Fou, is untangled into a hundred strand-like paths leading to monasteries that are hidden among the shadows of every gorge, and to temples hung on the shelves of cliffs. One path goes to the Monastery of Fa-Shau, in its deep pit of shrubs and lanwhui; another climbs 5up among boulders and cataracts to the Temple of Wa-Shau, thence three thousand feet higher to the Royal Monastery of Putwan, while yet another threading path goes on a thousand feet above where the Temple of the Moon clings to a mountain peak and whither companies of chanting bonzes go from the monasteries below to offer up prayers when the harvest moon is full.

The antiquity of this old road extends back beyond the records of men, but it is known that, centuries after its trace had been deeply scarred through the White Cloud Hills and across the plains of Tsang Tsing, it was made into a king’s highway and paved with granite blocks, eight feet long, two feet broad and often a foot in thickness. Yet the long bare tread has not only eroded them away, but hills have been worn down and cañons have been made by these century streams of men’s feet, treading to and fro and dwelling by it for so long that their comings and goings are unknown. For babes were born on this way and reared by its trace long before the she-wolf suckled Silvia’s twins on the old road by the Tiber’s bank. And like the road of Cenis, it has been traversed by armies of different ages; it has resounded with their triumphant march; it has echoed with the furtive footfall of their flight; the pageants of Emperors have passed over it—and long files of sighing beggars.

6One September afternoon on this old road, past the ruins of Kingtai and near the southern summits of the White Cloud Hills, were seen neither porters nor farmers nor beggars nor the retinues of mandarins. The road was deserted other than by two men climbing slowly to the summit.

The sultry heat of the afternoon was choking, and at short intervals the men halted to gain their breath and wipe the perspiration from their faces. An oppressive, nervous lassitude weighed down the air; neither from bush nor tree, from hillside nor glen, was to be seen or heard a living creature.

The two men, approaching the top of the White Cloud Hills, were as silent as their surroundings, and, until they reached the summit, when the Valley of the Chu Kiang and the City of Yingching lay below them, they appeared as unconscious of each other’s presence as they were apparently oblivious to their surroundings. But when they came to the bare mountain top, the manner of the older man changed; anxiously he scanned the sky, the horizon, the fields and the river below them as if to find in the wide estuary of the Chu Kiang some cause for alarm.

Nothing could have been more peaceful or beautiful. The sky was cloudless, the horizon faintly hazy, while the slanting rays of the sun cast a golden sheen upon the great river and the 7rice-fields that extended from it to the hills. These fields, in different shades of green and brown, interlaced with canals, were like a great shimmering, silken quilt stitched together by threads of gold. Far eastward, on the left, they merged into banana plantations, orchards of olive and lichee; westward they ended at the edge of the eastern suburbs of Yingching.

The city, seen from the summit where the two men stood, appeared a vast expanse of reddish roofs, shaded here and there by groves of banians. A great old wall encircled the old city, but dimmed by distance, its broken merlons were not seen nor the ravages of war, nor the erosions of a thousand years, nor the veiling draperies of maiden-hair fern that hung from the chipped interstices. These huge, aged and lichen-warted walls loomed up black, impregnable. Outside of them the eastern suburbs could be seen extending from under the East Gate obliquely in direction of and along the bank of the river, while the western and southern suburbs were hidden by them. Above the city, on the heights where climbed the northern wall, rose the Great Sea-Guarding Tower. Just south of it, within the walls, was the wooded peak of Yueshan surrounded with the clustering courts and temples of the Goddess of Mercy—that many-handed Goddess, who is so great in pity and compassion, saving from misery and from woe, and who is ever 8listening to the cries that come up from the world. Below the Temples, near by, in the centre of the city, two pagodas pierce the sky, one round and tapering, the other octagonal. Geomancers squinting up at them, say that this city is like a junk; that these two pagodas are her masts and the broad, five-storied tower on the north wall her stern sheets, and that the city is thus sailing southward, toward the island of Honan, which lies on the other side of the river, or beyond where rice-fields shimmer and the sky-line is serrated by low, ragged hills.

Here and there over the estuary of the Chu Kiang in the midst of their paddy-fields and orchards, lay walled towns and villages, half hidden under banians, while on the distant river bank, directly opposite the two men, the Lob pagodas point skyward, like great fingers, and on their left the pagodas of Wampoa and the Golden Lotus pierce the sky.

It was the peace, the dumb, inanimate peace of this scene that alarmed the older man. The river, usually teeming with a vast number and diversity of craft, was deserted other than now and then when a boat crept furtively along its southern bank. The fields were without men or oxen; the city and all the tree-veiled villages, which were scattered about among the fields, were silent, and a thin blue haze hung motionless over them.

For some time the two men looked down upon 9the delightful yet ominous panorama spread out beneath them; the older man troubled and uneasy, but the youth affected in no way, neither by the beauty nor the dumbness of it.

When they began to descend the elder left the old road sloping gradually along the hills toward the city, and led the way down by a steep path that, on reaching the level, meandered along the paddy banks in the direction of the river. But before they came to the river’s high embankment the sun had set, and as they turned westward along the top of the bank the older man suddenly stopped. Directly over the part of the horizon where the sun had disappeared hung a great halo, the under part of which gleamed red, the top was shrouded in black while between scintillated iridescent colours; below the black lay a cold mottled grey and above the red glowed a pink like the cheek of a young girl.

For some moments these colours hung distinctly over the misty horizon then commingled—the corpse-grey with the cheek of the maiden—and over all, the pall of black. The halo became ashen; wavered—vanished.

As the youth started to go the older man placed a detaining hand on his shoulder and pointed toward the sky-line where but a moment before the halo had hung.

Presently from where the sun had sunk were 10seen spreading enormous rays of light. Upward they unfolded, stretching finger-like, clear across the sky until they dipped their tips below the eastern horizon. At first these great fingers shone red as though dyed with blood, then vermilion, changing gradually through all the gold shades to an orange-saffron. When the finger-rays burned red, the intervening spaces were violet; when saffron, the sky was a pale green.

The youth watched dreamily these fingers tremble, coruscate, and change.

“It is God’s benediction,” he murmured.

“Or the Devil’s,” growled the other.

The two men waited until the great crepuscular rays, changing every instant their gorgeous colourings, had disappeared, leaving a red diffused light blotting the western sky, while a faint spectral mist crept along the eastern horizon. Troubled, the older man watched this whitish haze creeping along until it covered the eastern sky, then he hastened toward the city and the youth followed meditatively after him.

When they reached the edge of the suburbs they found all the field workers, women and oxen passively huddled about their mud-walled dwellings. Boatmen had drawn up their sampans and fishing craft high upon the bank. And in the doorways frightened faces peered uneasily down the 11river while everywhere rustled that restlessness, a fretfulness that is known by its silence. The children alone made their accustomed noises. Nothing could disconcert them. They played tag with Death and cried:

“You are it!”

As the two men entered the suburbs these children were in the midst of that bubbling, which marks the end of a day’s play. They were having unusual sport.

Along the coast of Southern China, among the many warnings that foretell the iron whirlwind’s approach none is more peculiar than the actions of dragon-flies, which seem to seek the companionship of men. They swarm into villages, fasten themselves on every projection, even lighting on the heads and shoulders of the inhabitants. Children, regardless of what they portend, seize upon them, and tying strings to their long abdomens, turn them loose amid laughter and cries. It was this easy conquest of the myriad-eyed monsters that aroused their wild mirth as the men approached.

The mothers of these gamins were burning incense-sticks in stone basins beside their doorways, and sometimes strips of red paper on which were written prayers. In the sampans and fishing boats, women were also making propitiatory offerings—the boat’s prow serving as an altar. In one place 12on the river bank, a party of old leathery boatwomen chattered garrulously over a stone slab on which were placed a row of bowls containing rice, fowls, sweets and wine.