THE HANGING HOUSE
By a subterranean stairway I descend to the hanging house. Just as the swallow fashions her shelter with patience, between the planks and the rafter, and the seagull glues her nest like a pannier to the rock; so, by a system of clamps, bolts, and girders driven into the stone, the wooden box that I inhabit is solidly attached to the arch of an enormous porch hollowed in the mountain itself. A trap-door arranged in the floor connects me with the world; by means of it on both these days, letting my little basket drop at the end of a cord, I have drawn it up filled with a little rice, some roasted pistachio nuts, and vegetables pickled in brine. In a corner of the formidable masonry, like a trophy made of Medusa’s tresses, hangs a fountain whose inexhaustible lament is carried away in a whirlpool. I draw up the water I need by means of a cord knotted in open meshes, and the smoke of my cooking mingles with the spray of the cascade.
The torrent is lost among the Palms, and I see below me the crowns of the great trees from which they draw sacerdotal perfumes. And, as a shattering of crystal is enough to disturb the night, all the keyboard of the earth is awakened by this neutral, hollow jingling of rain on that deep flint.
I see in the monstrous niche where I am ensconced the very tympanum of the massive mountain, like an ear hollowed in the temporal rock. And, collecting all my attention, bending all my joints, I will attempt to hear, above the murmur of leaves and birds, those sounds which this enormous and secret pavilion undoubtedly gives access to: the oscillations of the universal waters, the shifting of geological strata, the groans of the hurtling earth under an effort contrary to gravitation.
Once a year the moon rises at my left above this escarpment, cutting the shadows at the height of my waist on so exact a level that, with ever so little more delicacy and precaution, I could float a plate of copper upon it. But I like best the last step of the stairway, which descends into the void. Many times I have awakened from meditation, bathed in the dews of the night like a rose-bush; or, in the comfortable afternoon, I have appeared to throw handfuls of dry letches like little red bells to the monkeys perched below me on the furthest branches.