Rivers and lakes in abundance fill the central plain. One may look West, North, East and see ranges of snow-capped mountains. When I was a young man I travelled through an endless bamboo forest unvisited by man. It lay several days walk from the Twin Cities and teemed with peculiar animals and birds. Yet its strangest denizen was a monk who had lived for two hundred and fifty-three years, sustained by a diet of sunbeams and dew. . .’ From Dream Pool Essays by Shen Kua Apricot Corner Court, Nancheng. Spring, 1267. Midnight had become a dull hour in Water Basin Ward since the curfew. The drifting crowds of revellers who once haunted its streets had vanished, replaced by patrols of Watchmen. Shih sat in the tower room he used for preparing medicines, hands flat on his knees, eyes half-closed, mind fluttering between one place and the next. Though he had learned the dao of meditation from his orderly, Mung Po, it would not come.
