If I permit a concrete, scientific reaction, I must acknowledge the source to be a passing bug,--a giant bug,--related distantly to our malodorous northern squash-bug, but emitting a scent as different as orchids' breath from grocery garlic. But I accept this delicate volatility as simply another pastel-soft sense-impression--as an earnest of the worthy, smelly things of old jungles. There is no breeze, no slightest shift of air-particles; yet down the gorge comes this cloud,--a cloud unsensible except to nostrils,--eddying as if swirling around the edges of leaves, riding on the air as gently as the low, distant crooning of great, sleepy jungle doves.
With two senses so perfectly occupied, sight becomes superfluous and I close my eyes. And straightway the scent and the murmur usurp my whole mind with a vivid memory. I am still squatting, but in a dark, fragrant room; and the murmur is still of doves; but the room is in the cool, still heart of the Queen's Golden Monastery in northern Burma, within storm-sound of Tibet, and the doves are perched among the glitter and tinkling bells of the pagoda roofs. I am squatting very quietly, for I am tired, after photographing carved peacocks and junglefowl in the marvelous fretwork of the outer balconies, There are idols all about me--or so it would appear to a missionary; for my part, I can think only of the wonderful face of the old Lama who sits near me, a face peaceful with the something for which most of us would desert what we are doing, if by that we could attain it. Near him are two young priests, sitting as motionless as the Buddha in front of them.
After a half-hour of the strange thing that we call time, the Lama speaks, very low and very; softly:
"The surface of the mirror is clouded with a breath."
Out of a long silence one of the neophytes replies, "The mirror can be wiped clear."
Again the world becomes incense and doves,--in the silence and peace of that monastery, it may have been a few minutes or a decade,--and the second Tibetan whispers, "There is no need to wipe the mirror."
When I have left behind the world of inharmonious colors, of polluted waters, of soot-stained walls and smoke-tinged air, the green of jungle comes like a cooling bath of delicate tints and shades. I think of all the green things I have loved--of malachite in matrix and table-top; of jade, not factory-hewn baubles, but age-mellowed signets, fashioned by lovers of their craft, and seasoned by the toying yellow fingers of generations of forgotten Chinese emperors--jade, as Dunsany would say, of the exact shade of the right color. I think too, of dainty emerald scarves that are seen and lost in a flash at a dance; of the air-cooled, living green of curling breakers; of a lonely light that gleams to starboard of an unknown passing vessel, and of the transparent green of northern lights that flicker and play on winter nights high over the garish glare of Broadway.