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MOH-CHIEN should have lived in the days of Confucius, or tippled wine and made glorious lyrics to the moon with Li T'ai-po. For he was one of those now fast-vanishing folk, relic of a medieval scholastic day, a Chinese scholar and mystic. His faded, scarlet-rimmed eyes had peered into strange places. He had pieced together the legends on ancient stone tablets. He had muttered the talismanic words disclosed. Then he had watched the curtain of reality swing back. He had seen a forest of imploring arms, raised toward him, asking to return from that shadowy world, the Western paradise—the myriads who had tasted of the Yellow Springs.
Early one evening he was returning to his home, a village not far from the city of Soochow. The path was too narrow to admit a rickshaw, and he was walking, feebly. The distance before him was still ten li.
A wrack of clouds tumbled in a vast hurry across the sky, like breakers on the shore when the typhoon rages. And something resembling a typhoon was brewing to the southwest. Lightning flashed with fitful petulance. Moh-chien gazed upward, not without trepidation; bones do not stand the buffeting of the water gods with impunity.
The weather was unusual, and unseasonable, for the mid-autumn festival. This vaguely troubled Moh-chien; the moon goddess must be angry, since she was veiling her face during the time that men wished to worship her.
With a howl, the storm suddenly broke; directly over his head it seemed. The night dropped like a gigantic cloak, a clinging sable velvet, stifling. Then rain, sheet upon sheet of cold, stinging musketry-fire.
Moh-chien shaded his eyes and peered through the deluge. At first he could make out nothing except that whirling gray-blackness. Later, he thought he could discern a wavering cluster of lights, a li away. A momentary lull confirmed his observation. A tiny hamlet. Staggering beneath the screaming menace of wind and rain, he made for the home with the nearest light.
As he neared the habitation he stumbled over a grave-mound and fell, He picked himself up with a groan. The brick wall of the mound seemed newly built; it had not crumbled and showered tile upon him.
