smooth body. My blood has soured to gall. The ten toes of my feet are hard as buzzards' claws from the stones of roads, from clambering cold rockfaces of hills. For uncountable days' journeys jouncing on the humps of camels iron horizons have swayed like the rail of a ship at sea mountains have tossed like wine shaken hard in a wine cup. I have heard men sing songs of the scarlet pools of the sunset. Two men, bundled pyramids of brown abreast, bow to the long slouch of their slowstriding camels. Shrilly the yellow man sings: In the courts of Han green fowls with carmine tails peck at the yellow grain court ladies scatter with tiny ivory hands, the tails of the fowls droop with multiple elegance over the wan blue stones as the hands of courtladies droop on the goldstiffened silk of their angular flower-embroidered dresses. In the courts of Han little hairy dogs are taught to bark twice at the mention of the name of Confucius. The twittering of the women that hop like silly birds through the courts of Han became sharp like little pins in my ears, their hands in my hands rigid like small ivory scoops to scoop up mustard with when I had heard the songs of the western pools where the great queen is throned on a purple throne in whose vast encompassing arms all bitter twigs of desire burst into scarlet bloom. Padding lunge of the camel's stride over flint-strewn hills. The brown man sings: On the house-encumbered hills of great marble Rome no man has ever counted the columns no man has ever counted the statues no man has ever counted the laws sharply inscribed in plain writing on tablets of green bronze. At brightly lit tables in a great brick basilica seven hundred literate slaves copy on rolls of thin parchment adorned by seals and purple bows the taut philosophical epigrams announced by the emperor each morning while taking his bath. A day of rain and roaring gutters the wine-reeking words of a drunken man who clenched about me hard-muscled arms and whispered with moist lips against my ear
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