The scholar and the waterfall

My master has been looking at the waterfall since the incense burned down, and my legs have gone to sleep.

I am the small one by the railing, the one you probably missed. He is the tall one in white. We climbed up here in the morning on a path wet with mist, past the old pine, and when we reached this terrace he stopped at the rail and lifted his face toward the fall and has not moved since. I stand beside him in case he wants something. He never wants anything.

From where I am, I can see the water better than he can, I think. It drops behind the trunk of the pine in a single pale band, so far off the sound comes to us softened, and the mist eats the bottom of it before it lands anywhere. Above us the pine reaches its arm out over the terrace, branch after crooked branch, the needles bunched in little dark bursts, and a creeper with fat leaves has climbed into it and hangs there. The rocks in front of us are black and sharp, cut in hard strokes. Everything else goes soft and brown and then goes away.

Once I asked him what he was looking at. He said, the water. I said, but it is the same water. He said nothing for so long that I thought he had not heard. Then he said, it is not.

I have been thinking about that all morning. It makes my head hurt in a pleasant way.

Ma Yuan, a painter at the Southern Song court in the early thirteenth century, put us on a leaf of silk smaller than a dinner plate, about twenty-five centimetres square, in ink and soft colour. He is famous for setting the weight of a picture in one corner, and he did it to us: the pine and the rocks and the two of us crowded down at the left, the rest given over to mist and distance. Two red seals, stamped later, sit in the open space at the right.

The silk has darkened over eight hundred years to the colour of weak tea. My master’s robe is as white as ever, and I am waiting for him to say we can go down.

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