[ooc: PART I]
Silence in the Golden Pumpkin restaurant. Its lights are turned off, only the footlights of the stage shine lending the silk clouds a halo that is jade in colour, and the stage an ethereal aura. Two figures, each wearing an exquisite gown embroidered with a golden dragon swallowing a crimson sun appear from the darkness. Mingzhu takes centre stage. “The entertainment will begin shortly, but first, my father Dr. Chee begs ten minutes of your time.” She withdraws and strikes a pose; Chunhua steps forward and casts into the air a handful of dust, a twinkling rain of stars float to earth, as they fall Dr. Chee is revealed.
He unfolds his fingers, on his palm shines a brilliant point of white light. It expands and levitates, shining like a mirrored ball illuminated by a thousand candles. “We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.” The ball vanishes.
“I learned of Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart a few days ago, so I could not offer them my support for their adventure through Sinkiang to Kashmir--for that, ladies and gentlemen, is where they hope to journey; not to the border of Tibet and the monastery of Kumbum for which they have visas. All that I did do, however, is throw this farewell party, a good luck party; and I am happy that you”—Dr. Chee sweeps his arm over the audience—“are here with me tonight. I said ‘good luck,’ and they will need it. Sinkiang is nominally under the authority of the Nationalist Government: it is not! Tungan rebels—Moslem fanatics—control the oases of the Taklamaken Desert, and there is rumour that the Bolsheviks control the city of Urumchi. Sinkiang is a dangerous place.”
A church bell, clearly audible, interrupts Dr. Chee, he waits until it chimes eight times.
“Ah, the bell of our Catholic Mission: to non-Christians—the majority of the race—a sound more nauseating than superstition.
“All art is derived from China, where a high, fine subtle culture has reigned since a time immemorial. Older than Egypt is her wisdom. When the western races were eating one another, before Greece was even heard of, the Chinese had reached a level of knowledge and achievement that few realise. Never have they, even in earliest times, been deluded by anthropomorphic conceptions of the Deity, but perceived in everything the expressions of a single whole whose giant activities they reverently worship. Their contempt for the western scurry after knowledge, wealth, machinery is justified. The Chinese discern the essence of everything, leaving out the superfluous, the unessential, the trivial. Men, it seems, need a dream to carry them through life’s disappointments, a dream that they can enter at will and find peace, contentment, happiness.
“Now,” says Dr. Chee, “I’ll tell you a tale from my youth; it explains my interest in the journey of Fleming and Maillart:
"We must pity the living and part with the dead, but I have never forgotten old Shan-Yu—a picturesque East End dealer of many years ago. I befriended him when I spent several years at Trinity College. He thought very highly of me, and before he died he offered me something very wonderful, his most valuable possession.” Dr. Chee lowers his voice to a whisper almost devotional: “The Perfume of the Garden of Happiness,” he murmurs, with an expression in his eyes as though the mere recollection gives him joy. “Shan-Yu acquired the perfume whilst he was a monk in a Confucian temple--a cave, cut into the basalt rock beneath the dunes--outside the town of Khotan, Sinkiang.
“‘Burn it,’ Shan-Yu told me, ‘in a brazier; then inhale. You will enter the Valley of a Thousand Temples wherein lies the Garden of Happiness, and there you will meet your Love. I give this to you who alone of men here appreciate the wisdom of our land. Follow my body towards the Sunrise. You will meet your Destiny.’ Shan-Yu held out a warning hand. ‘Careful,’ he said gravely, ‘be careful, my old friend—unless you desire to share the rapture and the risk that have been mine. To enjoy its full effect, true, this powder must be burned in a brazier and its smoke inhaled; but even sniffed--and you are in danger.’ ‘Of what?’ I asked, impressed by the others extraordinary intensity of voice and manner. 'Of Heaven; but, possibly, of Heaven before your time.’
“I understand the mind and nerves. States of consciousness I also can explain, and the effect of drugs; perfumes, too, and their extraordinary evocative power.” He stands in the middle of the stage, the light falling on his interesting and thoughtful face. “I have smelt the perfume of the Garden of Happiness, and I have been in the Valley of a Thousand Temples; let me explain:
“It was years later in China: dusk, the stars were coming out in the pale evening air, and the orchards, as I passed them, stood like wavering ghosts of unbelievable beauty. The effect of thousands upon thousands of these trees, flooding the twilight of a spring evening with their sea of blossom, is almost unearthly. They seem transparencies, their colour hangs sheets upon the very sky. I crossed a small wooden bridge that joined two of these orchards above a stream, and in the dark water I watched a moment the mingled reflection of stars and flowering branches on the quiet surface. It seemed too exquisite to belong to earth, this fairy garden of stars and blossoms, shining faintly in the crystal depths, and my thought, as I gazed, dived suddenly down the little avenue that memory opened into former days. I remembered Shan-Yu’s present, given to me when he died. His very words came back to me: The Garden of Happiness in the Valley of the Thousand Temples, with its promise of love, and the prophecy that I should follow his body towards the Sunrise and meet my destiny.
“This memory I took home with me into my lonely house upon the hill. My servants did not sleep there. There was no one near. I sat by the open window with my thoughts, and you may easily guess that before very long I had unearthed the long-forgotten packet from among my things, spread its contents--a saffron powder--on a metal tray above a lighted brazier, and was comfortably seated before it, inhaling the light orange smoke with its exquisite and fragrant perfume.
“A light air entered through the window, the distant orchards below me trembled, rose and floated through the dusk, and I found myself, almost at once, in a pavilion of flowers; a blue river lay shining in the sun before me, as it wandered through a lovely valley where I saw groves of flowering trees among a thousand scattered temples. Drenched in light and colour, the Valley lay dreaming amid a peaceful loveliness that woke what seemed impossible, unrealizable, longings in my heart. I yearned towards its groves and temples, I would bathe my soul in that flood of tender light, and my body in the blue coolness of that winding river. In a thousand temples must I worship. Yet these impossible yearnings instantly were satisfied. I found myself there at once . . . and the time that passed over my head you may reckon in centuries, if not in ages. I was in the Garden of Happiness and its marvellous perfume banished time and sorrow, there was no end to chill the soul, nor any beginning, which is its foolish counterpart.
“Nor was there loneliness.” Dr. Chee clasps his thin hands, and closes his eyes a moment in what is evidently an ecstasy of the sweetest memory man may ever know. “I was not alone,” he resumes, opening his eyes again, and smiling out of some deep inner joy. “Shan-Yu came down the steps of the first temple and took my hand, while the great golden figures in the dim interior turned their splendid shining heads to watch. Then, breathing the soul of his ancient wisdom in my ear, he led me through all the perfumed ways of that enchanted garden, worshipping with me at a hundred deathless shrines, led me, I tell you, to the sound of soft gongs and gentle bells, by fragrant groves and sparkling streams, mid a million gorgeous flowers, until, beneath that unsetting sun, we reached the heart of the Valley, where the source of the river gushed forth beneath the lighted mountains. He stopped and pointed across the narrow waters. I saw the woman. She smiled at me and held her hands out, and while she did so, even before I could express my joy and wonder in response, Shan-Yu, I saw, had crossed the narrow stream and stood beside her. I made to follow then, my heart burning with inexpressible delight. But Shan-Yu held up his hand, as they began to move down the flowered bank together, making a sign that I should keep pace with them, though on my own side.
“Thus, side by side, yet with the blue sparkling stream between us, we followed back along its winding course, through the heart of that enchanted valley, my hands stretched out towards the radiant figure of my Love, and hers stretched out towards me. They did not touch, but our eyes, our smiles, our thoughts, these met and mingled in a sweet union of unimagined bliss, so that the absence of physical contact was unnoticed and laid no injury on our marvellous joy. It was a spirit union, and our kiss a spirit kiss. Therein lay the subtlety and glory of the Chinese wonder, for it was our essences that met, and for such union there is no satiety and, equally, no possible end. The Perfume of the Garden of Happiness is an essence. We were in Eternity.
“The stream, meanwhile, widened between us, and as it widened, my Love grew farther from me in space, smaller, less visibly defined, yet ever essentially more perfect, and never once with a sense of distance that made our union less divinely close. Across the widening reaches of blue, sunlit water I still knew her smile, her eyes, the gestures of her radiant being; I saw her exquisite reflection in the stream; and, mid the music of those soft gongs and gentle bells, the voice of Shan-Yu came like a melody to my ears:
“‘You have followed me into the sunrise, and have found your destiny. Behold now your Love. In this Valley of a Thousand Temples you have known the Garden of Happiness, and its Perfume your soul now inhales.’
“‘I am bathed,’ I answered, ‘in a happiness divine. It is forever.’
“‘The Waters of Separation,’ his answer floated like a bell, ‘lie widening between you.’
“I moved nearer to the bank, impelled by the pain in his words to take my Love and hold her to my breast.
“‘But I would cross to her,’ I cried, and saw that, as I moved, Shan-Yu and my Love came likewise closer to the water’s edge across the widening river. They both obeyed, I was aware, my slightest wish.
“I heard his words, I noticed for the first time that in the blaze of this radiant sunshine we cast no shadows on the sea of flowers at our feet, and—I stretched out my arms towards my Love across the river.
“‘I accept my destiny,’ I cried and stepped forward into the running flood. As the cool water took my feet, my Love’s hands stretched out both to hold me and to bid me stay. There was acceptance in her gesture, but there was warning too.
“I did not falter. I advanced until the water bathed my knees, and my Love, too, came to meet me, the stream already to her waist, while our arms stretched forth above the running flood towards each other.
“The change came suddenly. Shan-Yu first faded behind her advancing figure into air; there stole a chill upon the sunlight; a cool mist rose from the water, hiding the Garden and the hills beyond; our fingers touched, I gazed into her eyes, our lips lay level with the water—and the room was dark and cold about me. The brazier stood extinguished at my side. The powder had burnt out, and no smoke rose. I slowly left my chair and closed the window, for the air was chill.”
[ooc: PART II
There isn't a pause in Dr. Chee's monologue, but you may whisper to another character or ask me an "ooc" question.]
