The diverse colourings and rare and marvelous tinctures and pigments of the peoples, especially of the greater Arafura, Java, and Sunda Islands, the Polynesias, the Nippons, and the Bangla and Chota Nagpur, Persia, and the Takli Makan, Dasht-e-Kavir and An Nafud Deserts, as they are manifest in the plants, baked clays and saps in the present work of Dormovan, Plantesque and Frenecirces, being of ecumenical and portent attentions, whom here witness the plenty and variety of all that they have seen, and of what they have learned from others in small words.

Gifted waves breaking here must know a headland across a singing sea.  Cresting salt between that distant song and claiming soil must see as the bloomed heather sees, with its perfume an instantaneous link to each purposed bee lost on its own famous wings.  Shaping the umber seed upon this heath, a note for each wave towing its end.  Breaking here the siren song.  How these waves tender this lament, their universal tones in multiples of the leafing storm, deep in the rose of jericho.

A passage over water, owning sail in a crowded wake.  Oceans through the arcs of sails, a shadow mixing in coral.  There rises a stealing air, a colouring to the field in heat.  And so taciturn its wailings that it comes of the mulberry and the heath-bell, and this is part of the telling.  From this shore of sands, the pearled wish of wind.  This is the flame of the journey kindled so strangely, taming where it would not out.  Three whom have long measured the "infinite and profound skies," are of the secular tongues, have long borne the seal, attempt to gather "the condition of music."  The oars now chocked in their blocks.  The shifting of the land in this waiting space, to an ecumenical garden of new place and sublime difference.

Waking upon the air, the destination coast and the resin plumes.  Lament aloud its blueness over the blueness of waves.  Yachi maidens in a sky, triangle the mat of air, know their fertile wombs, milk in the waves.

All that is colour, bird, or name will once more be hardly a handful of night, and over the remains of ciphers and feathers and the body of love, made of fruit and music, will finally fall, like sleep or a shadow, the unremembering dust.  (Jorge Carrera Andrade)

If the desert permits passage, the will of the dunes is for sleeping, that you may know of the depth of stars.  And the nocturne will release you in its course.  In the same measure of rare jewels, there is one night, "the night of nights, upon which the gates of the sky open wide and the water in the water jugs tastes sweeter." 

Frenecirces whops the flanks of his camel with a length of baobab, the spiral black gold ribbing of his cowl low on his head.  The camels, however, bolt for the distant/destined light as soon as they are untethered.  Dormovan has newly studied the spiral cutting of the melons of Sapurgan, is carefully tooling as he rides, and not attending to his camel's lead.  Plantesque's mount circles left mourning the loss of Prallus's camel when stars are not visible, and requires continual correction.  Frenecirces would like to suggest a route but the two head camels are moving too quickly, and is slowed by his four large goat-skins of myrrh. 

torreya (kaya), zelcova (keyaki), oak (kunugi; kashiwa), pasania (shii), paper mulberry (kozo), cypress (hinoki), ginkgo (itcho), birch (kaba), plum (ume), maple (kaede), chestnut (kuri), walnut (kurumi), holly (hiiragi), paulownia (kiri), cherry (sakura), willow (yanagi), fir (momi), cotton (momen), persimmon (kaki), horse chestnut (tochi).

Samarkand.  The Square at Registan.  The daybeds of Bukhara, bed-tables.  Beneath the trees by the sacred pool: Lyab-i-Khauz.  The Kalyan Minarets.

The whole province of Kalacha, "where they manufacture those intricately beautiful camelots," reads this fluorescence of light in the night sky to mean that a variety of great things will happen.

Egyptian binder.  Its precise nature used in colours by ancient Egyptians (from about 4700 BC) is uncertain, but it was water based, possibly gum arabic.  The dry climate and sealed tombs preserved the colours for centuries, but just a damp cloth wiped over their surface will remove them from a wall.

At Scassem, we meet with the grand Chenku, from whom we may procure dark waters of a rare hue.  The Frippa of Scassem collect wild bundles of a certain river reed.  From its pulp is produced the liquids which give the carpets in the great halls of Scassem their deep crimson.  We prepare for the long desert crossing into Erginul.

So valuable was Tyrian purple that it led the Phoenecians from 1600 onward to explore throughout the Mediterranean, down the coast of Africa and up to the British Isles, in search of more shell beds from which to produce the purple dye: murex brandaris.  12,000 shells are needed to make 1.5 grams of pure dye, so rare that only royalty acquired the royal purple.  Anthony and Cleopatra dyed purple all the sails of their ship for the battle of Actium in 31 BC. 

Dormovan, Plantesque and Frenecirces (three trappers/merchants/nomads, now without Prallus who was never seen after the storm at Hörh Uul) are setting porcupine traps outside the town of Scassem, and in Erginul, hope to find there some of the highly valued dark waters known as gudderi.  They believe that these bright-shining stars are also a sign of a pending happening, but that their divination is of some unexplained auspice. 

To find the winged fleece, Jason moves into the night.  He finds only tiny filaments of gold, of the gold of legend.

The camels continue starstruck by strange illumination in the night sky.  Even in the mountains the falcons of the species called saker (fako saker), "which are excellent birds, and of strong flight," remain on the ground.  The great lanner birds are idle in their nests, and the sparrow hawks are strangely docile. 

Lilavati, she of sixteen summers, she wears ropes of vivid yellows, garlands of deep green, and she speaks of love to her confindantes while she waits for her beloved.  Madhu-madhavi, has a golden complexion and is of comparable beauty.  She wears the sacred colours of her caste.

cowdown.  thistle.  lambskin.  oil paper.  bell moss.  rainwater.  chestnut. 

Erginul is home to fierce biting insects from which the people use a paste made from a type of broad leaf as insouciant.  It is also here that the finest and most valuable dark water may be procured.  We assemble with the priests of the Un-khan to witness the ritual collection of the sacred gudderi.  The dark water is obtained in the following manner from a small antelope of the region.  When the moon is full, "a bag or imposthume of coagulated blood forms itself about the umbilical region" of the animal.  This membrane is severed and afterwards dried in the sun.  It proves to produce the finest golden hue that is known.

Fig tree; giant banyans (Nigroda, Ficus Indica; Pipal, F. Religiosa), sacred to both Hindus and Buddhists; Hibiscus, Frangipani, Bougainvillea, Sal Trees (Lumbini), viburnum, barberry, rhododendron, "on a golden wind comes a rich humus smell of autumn," daisies, alder and ilex, everlasting, wild strawberry, sphagnum moss, bracken, pale lavender asters, privit and the rose, a dark grove of mossy oaks, crossing wet tundra with purple gentians, pink-belled heath, yellow maples, a wall of firs, bare rock, pony bells, resined air of pine forest and cedar, silver lichens, golden moss, the view full of light, cotoneaster of deep green with its red berries, a treeline of dwarfed cedar, a ridge of alpine tundra, "the forest on this ridge is oak and maple and a mist of yellow leaves softens the ravine's sides all around," the full moon of October when the lotus blooms, the air is ringing, the rhododendron leaves are burnished silver, gnarled birch and dark stiff firs, light filtered by straying lichens, the shape of bark, a forest of great evergreens, bamboo, "a grassy slope of stolid oaks and lithe wild olives," hill pasture, asters and everlasting, lavender and white, yellow squash, red peppers, bronze tobacco, a red millet, maize and hemp, "we strip the bushes of tart barberries and rose hips," a shard of rose quartz, a cinnamon fern with spores, birch and fire coloured ash, strap fern, unknown alpine florets, fresh mineral blue, he places a small stone upon the cairn, "a wasteland of sere and stubble and spent stone," spruce and fir and pine, potato patches, red buckwheat, sheepskins, calabashes, maize on the cob and small tomatoes, "in the willow and aspen shade at streamside," wild walnut trees, fresh marigolds, "wild roses gather in clear pale-yellow blossom," a chestnut falls on a mat of yellow leaves, bronze-lichened boulders, forest resin. 

Frenecirces arrives after two days without water.  We trade myrrh for precious gems and as much gudderi as we may safely carry. Not in the supposed parts of my sometimes self, that is, not in that quarter of my thinkings which I intermittently can compare to a somehow more fixed reality, but in the essences of my being, there in the true states of (what may be revelationary) synergies I have five unexperienced senses, a oneness of physical being radiating its connectedness with a great universal light, and an infinite volatility of modalities in change.  (From the writings of Prallus Mindicus Alliutianius)

The air is dry.  A crow lifts a branch, leaves it behind her, uses all the blue in her blackness, quickly threshing the direction ahead.  The omen of cardinals.  And red, brilliant crimson, vermillion, fire in the weed staggering a hill, surrounding the lightning strikes, seeded in the clinging soil, among the grikes of rocks.  Heat stiffens in the wind, and crickets begin. 

That the pilgrimage enables some sense, that in its taking up and letting go, a combing of its intent be made steady for seeking eyes, proffered in some gleaning or simple net of acts.  The An Nafud miracles seem the opposite of things, are made most of, are made great by contrast, are sought out to improve a present value close to us, that their otherness generate a collision of senses, to deny them, and affirm the narrowing of all our fury.  (From the writings of Prallus Mindicus Alliutianius)

Islam Waters.  Water in its course.  The other river in time.  IMPLUVIUM.  The never-garden of once-defeat, falls to the relative, the scion of most probable strength, absorbing caliphs, sultans, and rites of passage.  The caravanserai of saffron corbeilles and ringing palm,  a once miraged movingness, real in its covered prints in the sand. 

1st day  the rhyming poppies 
2nd day  austral celestral 
3rd day  river rubour running 
4th day  glissando/fields' rain 
5th day  the night moth 
6th day  arena of sky 
7th day  stone circles and the falling of light 
8th day  a measure of gudderi 
9th day  the open vale in surety 
10th day  forest-in-the-breath 
11th day  the summit of winds 
12th day  coigns twilight and the saffron 
13th day  cloud-of-bells 
14th day  indigo of Chandernagor 
15th day  madder root and the spinning 
16th day  silverleaved wild olive and the willow
17th day  the satin valleys
18th day  hums of bees 
19th day  a lost bowman 
20th day  cinnamon and fine kermes 
21st day  yellows of the young mosses 
22nd day  the sleepless net of singings 
23rd day  skin in the ocean's skin

The Tapti is an Indian river of harems / rising out of red clay for snaking poppies / a rubine field of rhyming colour / from Taloda to Surat / myriad marionettes wake the empty view / taken up into the small rocks the small clouds / the ancient clay in her hair / maps a familiar skin / the arena upon her upturned face is completed / diminishing reflected sky

"Dormovan will meet us at Dasht-e-Kavir?"
"He will travel by carpet to the Azores."

Plantesque joins the salt air of Gibraltar coigns with Andaphur-and-the-islands in a trade of singing fibres, thick-glass bottles of sweet liquids, powders, stolen from Zhange mongols, which dye the skin, the smallest patterns caught up in the carpets of the Safavids.

Now we will treat of the people of the Takli Makan Desert and their customs where it is said that bysuss threads, from the pen shell, by which it attaches itself to rocks or coral, are woven into a gossamer golden bronze cloth of extreme fineness.  It is strong, silk-like, and golden.  It is said by the people of the Bangla and Chota Nagpur Desert that these threads are the very golden fleece of legend. 

At Bagadet, Baldach, for which its ancient name is Babylon.  Plantesque's horse is deep in the sinking sand, and in an excess of circumambulation, and twisted in knots around a group of acacias.  Neither hazard is of consequence, for Plantesque loosed his idea of universal empire and has joined purdah, sleeping in the maiden's jaws, taking his lamp with him as he went. 

When you are on the road to Casmir (India distilled, Casmir goats,  sandalwood, patchouli, mango, peach and coconut).  Kashmir filled with lotus flowers, lush mountains, breezy pavillions, and houseboats floating on streams.  Cashmere wool now comes from China, Tibet, Iran, and Russi, not Kashmir. 

HEATH: open cultivated ground; an extensive tract of waste land; a wilderness; now chiefly applied to a bare, more or less flat, tract of land, naturally clothed with low herbage and dwarf shrubs, esp. with the shrubby plants known as heath, heather or ling.  Part of a garden left more or less in the wild state.   Undershrubs of linnaean genus erica; e. (caliuna) vulgaris, common heath, heather or ling.  E. cinera fine-leaved heath (the common heath of some parts), and e. tetralix cross-leaved heath.  "Oft witth bolder wing they [bees] soaring dare The purple heath, or where the wild-thyme grows."  (1728-46 Thomson Spring 513)  Hardy Return of the Native; tamarisk, savin, juniperus sabina; 1382 Wyclif: iencian trees 1388 bromes 1885 tamarisk; "Get you awaye and be like vnto the heeth in ye wilderness." (Wyclif 1611 and R.V. marg.); short for heath butterfly, moth; locative: heath-bred -clad -grown -roofed -thatched; heath-bank -besom -broom -bush -field -fire -flower -ground -honey -land -man -mould -mutton -pony -snail -soil -tribe; heath-cropping; the ruddy glow of the heath flower; 1577 B. Googe Heresbach's Husb. IV 1586 184 "Heath Hony, a wilde kind of Hony being gathered while the Heath is in floure."  1819 heath bedstraw, hair-grass, rush; heath-bramble, the Dewberry; heath-corn, buckwheat; heath-cup  an erect herb of large blue flowers; heath-cypress  a club moss; heath-fern; the Sweet Mountain Fern; heath-grass; heath honeysuckle; heath-rose  the Rose of Jericho.  Heath-bramble, the Dewberry, Rubus Cæsius: "The lesser berie is called in Englishe, a heare Bremble, or heath Bram-ble.  The fruite is called a Dewberie, or blackberie."  (Lyte Dodoens VI. iv. 661 1578)   Heath-bell  the bell shaped flower of the heath, also blue-bell, purple in bloom; Bilberry, Crowberry, cramberries, hurtle-berries, bramble-berries, heath-berries.  (Oxford English Dictionary)

"A ship of the sea is not midnight mirage, but a game my eyes must be playing.  How many sails now run, horses whipped in the air of dunes with wings?"

Frenecirces, having cut his foot on some bowman's lost knife, limps and leans his walk through a grove of cryptomeria.  And he cleans his wound in one of the quick-running freshets of the Murat river.  Far from his native country, there are great strange things around him.  The stones along the watercouse are stones within stones.  The scarp above him is haunting in its newly strange folds of earth.  With his bandage firm he shakes off the high altitude morning coolness, rises through the trees and saddles his Kanbalu stallion.

You are speaking of the amaranthine path / over aged roots and printed shells / against the dim modena / stone over lichen stone / masons without mortar / blood without spoil.  You must be the mix that moving coil of emerald scion / and blood of known sepulchres / deep in ancient mornings / showing up rich   (Alo-eddin of Alau)

M. Polo pilots a small cabin plane.  Aboard are other travellers, merchants, herders, bearing their cargos.  Along a bathed shore of sea-thumbed shells and gneisses and corals, that they greet the eyes as the spark, fleeting and ephemeral, a reflection upon the hues so raging in them.

Erginul: gudderi waters made up into the air, from the packs on the backs of camels moving over the silk road.  Casque staves and tapestry ends.  Of caravans and caravanserai, of the webs of guilds in tinted valleys.  The waters which are gold. 

Of the carpets of the province of Balashan and of the precious baked clays and dark waters found there, the elles of fine cotton, the balass rubies, and silver from Idifa.

torreya, zelcova, oak (kunugi), oak (kashi), pasania, paper mulberry, cypress (hinoki), mitsumata, ginkgo, birch, plum, maple, chestnut, walnut, holly (hiiragi), lauan, paulownia, cherry, willow, fir, cotton, persimmon.  Casuarina, mahoe.  Holy tree (palo santo).

Sperm milk and lemons and coconuts, breadfruit.  Brazil nuts and hemp palm withes.  Belshazzar's feast.  B A B Y L O N.  See Nebuchadnezzar.  Kinu no michi.  The spice route of the Bedouin.  OPHIR.

"Dormovan.  Do you know when you're riding into a new place, when you're watching the weather coming toward you, and the sky is so big you could fall into it but you don't let yourself because there's more in the horizon curling up, rolling up over the shine of the earth and presenting countries of strangeness, do you know?  And the oceans of the world and the living myriad shells, a depth of luminous dark over the beds of seas, do you know?"

In the dreaming pollens of Babylon, when the rains cannot foil, are slow manoeveurs, growing, warming to the earth.  And teaming, flourish the air, caught up in the skims of small waters, and expire upon granite.  Their yellow waves of seed, the forest-in-the-breath.  Here nurse the blossoms and the gentle engines of islands, zelcovia healing in its own flames, spires of woodland nocturne/diurne from bud to disquieting blossom.  Artifice in the variables of wind, the enabler of great fictions, metamorphosing Zeuxis' pale purple plums (circles-of-confusion).  Add petals, white tones of strangeness in the dark-but-soft of leaves.  The thick of humus beds of resins and bounty and age. 

PASSAGES OF SPICE  Islam in China/India.  The carried seeds: tobacco (arnica) leaves, vessels. 

In the siege of a castle named Thai-gin in 1162, Chingis-khan was struck by an arrow in the knee, and dying of the wound, was buried in the mountain of Altai.

The organisms in the waxes of his wings, the membrane lattices of hearing.  Bringing his ears into the sounds of minute jungles in the leaves, rarefacting guns of engines of the secular vibrations of air.  That to his sleep these elements of sense were to have been so instilled is a querelous division of perception, for without, no sounds of any kind were discernible.  To himself alone was the noise of the world a chaotic of birds and animals and chines of air.  Given his place, others touched him little, and he found terrible rivers of life sometimes threatening him from within.  (From the writings of Prallus Mindicus Alliutianius)

ammobium, strawflower, mandevilla, passion vine, tibouchina, clivia, parkinsonia, bougainvillea, hibiscus, frangipani, musa bajoo, camellia, gunnera, callistemon citrinus, fremondia magnola grandiflora, dusty miller, blanket flower, larkspur, salvia, tri-colour sage, celosia plumosa, bupleurum rotundifolium, ammobium, cushion flower, rose everlasting, immortelle,  poppy, starflower, caneflower, sunflower, clarkia, coreopsis, jewels of Opar, apple of Peru, corn cockle, nicotiana sylvestris

The winds over Sunda / so often beautiful in their sad arguments / I mark each of these papers with stones / from the Tulangbawang River

Coming of the journey.  All of the captured blossoms and roots, timely cuts of uncurling fronds, waited-for pods disgorged of unripe fruits, the singing grasses fermented in sweatings of stone and leaves, from pasania, cypress, ginkgo, paulownia, mitsumata and the paper mulberry.

South and westerly winds bring parts of old deserts, hold them up yellow chalk on the sun.  This coming colour is the horizon of season's expectation. 

Nacre, since the Middle Ages in England, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, from pearl oysters, top shells, turban shells, river mussells, abalone. 

goldenrod; cochineal; betstraw roots; safflower; knot-weed; bayberry leaves; weld; broom sedge; indigo; chamomile; peach leaves; lichen; onion skins; black walnut; coreopsis; marigold; madder root; sumac berries; St. Johnswort; saffron; butternut; broom sedge; dahlia flowers; ageratum flowers; grape leaves; spanish moss.

I stole into the greatest markets (disguised) to know my own limbs, not constrained in the despot exchanges of the upper clerestories of castle's quarters.  Delivered into the senses of cardamom seas, a child's memory of fish marrows rotting in sandalwood, awakened in a new rain.  Saffron of the Bhopal hospices and the green ranges of still green dehiscent seeds let loose everywhere.  Come with me, engage me in these senses.  Query me their fineness and I will upon you only the most rare of divinations, show you their meeted songs.  (From the writings of Prallus Mindicus Alliutianius)

Frenecirces continues without Dormovan and Plantesque to O-shima-and-the-islands in a trade of powders.  In the persimmon fields of night, drawn long into the folds of the valleys, nested in these three things: the sleepless bower of the moon, looming tongues of mist, and a shallow note at intervals sending out the resin from pine limbs far overhead.  The Sadhus with their long orange robes offer red tilak powder while seated in their howdahs.  A great Indian bustard drops from a rain tree.  The Sadhus accept this as a sign of good business, and I am given gifts of kulkul and saffron.

AZORES: Corvo, Flores, Faial, Pica, Terciera, Sao Miguel, Ponta Delgado, Santa Maria, Algarve.  Caravels: Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria, Revenge.  Treasure: elephant tusks, six chests of gold, 44 bronze cannons, 66 bronze cannons, porcelain, gold, silver, precious stones, treasures from Peru, laden with treasure.  Sunk by French pirates, a great quantity of treasure aboard.

But all of this is frozen in sunlight, and none of the things within it have any relevance to my present place and circumstance, except for very general admissions.  So this is an image of an unrelated happening.  There can be no correlation.  Yet how is it in the row of waiting travellers, then, that this walla is the cynosure, remarkable and enigmatic?  How is it that those to whom I relate this fact will puzzle and find it curious, even haunting?  Within his palms, the mufti, and the umbrella, its wet rendered velvet.  He mixes with other muted colours on the platform shadows and stands a little to the right of the frieze bordered in tile.  Others stand near and show only the convincing poses of travellers, those truly bound for some other place.  This image is frozen and the caravan never arrives.  The caravan is nowhere seeable, but there is expectation in their preparedness, in the manner of those who wait, of anyone who intentionally waits. 

Here beside the rough track and bundles of dye powders which, too, seem to be waiting, are two men especially.  They grip what their hands hold tightly.  They are mounting the camels already.  The two men show none of the colour which the one with the umbrella has so much of.  I am thinking that this sky and his mufti which models it radiates what the man from Shrinagar was inherently.  There is something sublime in this light.

I move in the sad gazes of the greening porticos of long shadows of afternoons in heat.  Here are the markets.  Tour me you through these the greatest of secret collections, the most of all gatherings in human tides and colours by cloth.  Way up the cinders rise away up over, circle the tented those who will walk all of these chined-in-spice woodbins, wedded baskets, loose rabbles of fruits.  Break into the open square where one willows up in the free air, suggests a seat by the fountaining and can over the terracing roofs look.  How in a way more perfect the dross of cannons sunk in this harbour for a round of rusted bronze statues to see.  I am only this one here by the water linking the histories in my head, watching the market rows.

I look away from this one with the umbrella, and I look at the sky of my own circumstance which shows itself bereft of all of this Sufic majesty.  I am quickened back to this image and it holds me again.   He stands, his hands are both visible, and holds the umbrella.  It is the velvet in his hands.  There is copper coping along the caravanserai entrance and over the longest window, steaming.  All that is fluid seems to quaver.  The street is below.  It receives the run-off of rain from clerestories over the rails.  Night in day, shadows beneath the arches. 

During the time of the November Festival on Arafura, when the bowerbirds are weaving their lattices around the base of saplings, and the osmanthus and jargonelle are fields of themselves alone, you broke into the country markets from the booming shores of the outer islands.  There in the market square you had quickly found the way to El-a-shir at Arbarand as he turned out his collections.  The ships glistening, the holds nested in their trade of the Polynesias. 

So I lose my way and retrace the last few chicannes.  I turn at odd angles before meeting the place I left off.  Readjust against cardinal points lost in magnets, project to the horizon and the extent of the storm.  Find the compass spinning even now.

Taranto Italy factory produced bysuss fabric into the 19th c. 

A zoo garden.  A herbarium, a small ambitioned arbourium.  These blooded fruits, a conservatory of red in their beaks.  And I awoke, my hand on the green of their thorns. 

Crosses of strings, the bound and wrapped, the pigments and pods of seeds tied to his saddle.  From trade to following caravanserai, intermitting coigns of attention.  Tearing away their layers as he trades them, selectively owning small diagrams and patterns in the record which survives the logs which travel with the ships.  And in his collecting, a scented mix of cross-studies, sash pockets brindle with the wine of papers, their patina folds break where his fingers take in the objects of brief dynasties, dye collection methods, metals sciences, meteorology, ancient gardens, and in the sixth century bc, the visions of the people of Crete.  He has this habit, and ties them with special string, which he perceives as not better or stronger, but of a type that knows his hands well, and his use of this string is great.  The packages which make up his work, all are wrapped with it, for his work is in packages. 

In motion you offer only that which comes by way of singular hooves and lathering teams through a doorway heath, shedding the bells of thick hames, fast like the bearing sleighs over snowing countries.  You are out of the essence of the quotidian fury, have clamoured in steed the embrace of wind, have come long on the journey, are long on the way; of no consequence is it to you that the snow comes lightly, that the blowing has quelled (is now at your back), you are yet in some unsourced solace and stare back the strapping of the sleigh, which so quickly has brought you, out of the wood.

Snow of apples, only as the tree frozen, not knowing how to give up the fruit, the icing of the plump jewels sharing winter with their tree of fecund summer. 

This is the cherry of April.  This the sweet pear of later blossoms, still later fertile, and now the most bare.  A ferment in casks from these thick espaliers.  A persimmon chair, nested in the twigs and leaves and shaken fruits, seeds almost there, almost to the ground. 

Break at edges of window, trade boughs for sky.  My boot attaches some withered summer vine.  The same vine which grows in autumn shade has dropped perfect round berries black against snow.  Down through a pleaching fence and its webbed trellis, nascent greenness demonstrates reptilian ease, waking in this silence.

Sforza took for his device the mulberry tree symbol, in its long delay and sudden yielding of flowers and fruit together, of a wisdom which economizes all forces for an opportunity of sudden and sure effect.

The chinking corms of the autumn crocus / not yet committed / to the deepest hues of saffron

There is nothing here to indicate a delinquent pattern in the mix.  The mix is of a tarnishing musem that no completing additions may be offered to render it whole, but it fares independent of vice and assumes the weathers of moral stricture.  In the coming fortunes of a travelling, there yield the ways of that syncretic thing.  The voyage of the mix, the secular powers of thought which are not indifferent to unconscious collections, attests to a motility in real space, though too, makes aware the affront of its own ignorance.  The realization of the limitations brought together in ecumenical experience and fast nomenclature, in that they so differ by an opposing infinite wreath of interlinkings, permits the mix to swallow itself by claiming a mortality.

And I am made wept for the amber / Held in the arms of the sweetening bough / And sleeping / I am asleep in the memory of A. / So caught in this sudden resin / If you know the way of the small insects / saved forever in such peril

I have finished a slow stroke.  The paddle rests on the gunnel.  My legs have shot out to chase the thin keel, limbs in a whorl over the belly of a boat.  It carries its silence ahead, after the weight of water crashing up to meet me and I am under the skin of it, swimming.    A S H T A M U D I .

1. We shall be moving through steel, taking in lands of tiny countries, hiding in quarters.
2. Travelling,  seeing tunnels thrown by, pressing history under the wheels.
3.  At the Halh'im Tamhudri, past the horse stalls, the wine bars and chestnut stands.

T  a  s  s  i  l  i  :    the fertile lands of Cyrenaica, the salt marshes of El Agheila

Binkirai roof beams, kulkul, foundation walls of volcanic stone (from Undagawa) secured with lava-sand cement with Bata Merah walls (fired red brick) covered with a light coat of cement, plaster, crushed limestone & paint.  Bamboo-framed roof with teak beams tied with black hemp rope, covered with Bedeg (woven bamboo sheets) and terra-cotta tiles.  No nails or glass.  Twenty-seven hand-carved teak pillars,  supported on lava-stone bases.  Carved teak doors with typically low lintels.  No telephone or electricity.  Under the protection of sacred tree bark and the mask of a Balinese Goddess (hidden, according to custom, in the eaves of the roof).  Gunung Agung, Bali. 

BEARGARDEN: belvedere, wavepanes, shadowpanes in wavelight, shimmerpanes, wave-window (at the); Trefoil, Quatrefoil, Cinque-foil; barrel staves and withes; cowl/fairing; fold-in filter suspension; filter (fixed); splay; partial (full) stop; veneer scissor; [lambertian field] camber shell; rail flashings; stone steps

Bhutan: Buddhist Kingdom; (dzongs); Bumbtbang valley

China: Mount Guangzhou to Guilan (15 days walking); Kalais silk road (32 days Lhasa to Hunza); over the Tien Shan mountains; Pakistan; Afghanistan, and the great mountains of the Pamirs and Hindu Kush.  22 days prow-ship up the Pearl River; thirteen days through Guangdong.  Four days in Laoshoung. 

Crete: Phaestos

Egypt: archipelago of the Sunda between Patmos and Avalon; Mindanao Island; Thessalonica; [the Council of] Nicaea; Nile riverboats, Ellis Island; CAIRO: El Azhar souk; Theban necropolis; Temple of Karnak; Qurna (in the Theban hills); Aswan; Dendera; Esna; Abydos; Kom Ombo; Kitchener's Island [an Alhambra composed of vegetation]: Kobbet el Hawa cliff; Agha Khan's mausoleum; Luxor: Valley of the Kings (Egypt's obsession with lists); Edfu: Ptolemaic temple of the winged sub-god Horus with its magnificent granite falcons; Red Sea; 

Naishapur; Thar desert; Pushkar Fair; Casmir; Uttar Pradesh (Taj Mahal); a thin 132 km strip along the southwest coast. Baga/Calangute; Panaji: Fonthainas at Venite; Boats to Grand Island; New Konkan to Kerala by the Chapora River: Qeril, in the shadow of Terekhol Fort.  Harmal with fishing boats; Vagator, Anjuna, Sinquerim; Calangute/Candolim offers best indigo; Vaiguinim. Velsao to Mobor.  Colva to Benaulim for madder.  Varca and Palolem.  Tamil Nadu's temples, or west to Vijayanagar.  Rajasthan (dry October-March) for saffron and cardamom.  Delhi to Jaipur; Kartik Poornima: holy site for lustration.  Lake Pushkar for the camels. 

The great volcanoes of Bromo and Semeru in Tengger massif;  from Ngadisari, through the mountain village of Cemero Lawang. 

Palmyra [an unreal petrified forest of broken walls, colonnades, fallen capitals, with all its connotations of shaded pools, gleaming marble, sunlit gardens, where "sybaritic Rome married the languorous Orient"]

Batiks have been made  in the Javas since it was brought here by either Persians or Indians.  There are two major types of Javanese batik: the tulis, or hand draw, and the tjap printed.  Paste resist is the oldest form of batik.  It is the same technique used in Kalacha but the women who create the designs produce better work.  The rice and bran flour mixture, widely used in the Nippons and Sunda Islands, is combined with small amounts of powdered zinc-of-calot and salt, and cooked to make a transparent cream, which is stirred until cool.  The dye is applied to only one surface.  It is prepared by mixing powdered dye with a gum from the casuarina tree.  The fabric is steamed to set the dye.  After it is washed in clear, cold water and rinsed many times.  When dry, the fabric is laid out and the women gather to decide whose is best, for they are very competitive.

sweet-rush; water-oats; hollyhock; water plantain; water-bur; beach parsley; bear-ivy; moss; wood-sorrel; stone-crop; sage-brush; reed-mace; nut-grass; bull rush; duck-weed; green-vine; scattered chigaya reeds; horsetail; shepherd's purse; goose-grass; snake's beard; mountain sedge; club moss; crinum; the common reed; arrowroot leaves in the wind (for their undersides are extremely white); the bamboo grass; the round-leaved violet; pear tree; jujube tree; althea.

Papyrus is favoured by the Egyptians as a surface for their writing and painting.  The pulp of the papyrus, a seed, is widely used and is now the more rare.

"Records from the Sung Dynasty (960-1279) show that batiked cotton cloth from Java was very highly prized.  Javanese women produced sarongs (a rectangular cloth sewn into a tube and worn wrapped round the waist from hips to ankles); pandjangs (a long cloth, longer than the sarong); and slendangs (a long, narrow shawl).  Since about 1815 Java has imported cotton from India and it is always measured, cut and sewn before the batik work begins.  To prevent the liquid wax from spreading too much the cloth is sized with dilute rice or cassava paste." 

A girl of noble birth has been chosen as Imperial consort; but she is still living at home, where they refer to her as Princess.  When a Chamberlain visits her with a message from the Emperor, her lady-in-waiting, before even delivering the letter, first pushes out a cushion for him from behind the blinds.  As she does so, she displays the sleeves of her dress - a rare sight for a man of such humble rank.  (Sei Shonagon)

Now I will treat of the people of Ravadashpur and their ways of printing where there is a great production of many varieties of cloth, equally abundant in the variety of their design. Blocks of walnut or pearwood are carved in great detail and are coated in particular tree oils to take up the inks for printing. Parchment scrapings are used as sizing. Fine drawings in lampblack are transfered  onto a wooden block with linseed oil. Wax painting is worked in over the many lines of the design layed out in charcoal.  The wax is heated and applied with an instrument called a tjanting.  It consists of a copper cup with one or more spouts, fastened to a reed or bamboo handle.  For producing groups of spots, double lines, rosettes and the like, numbers of spouts are used.  Small spaces are filled in with larger spouts and bigger areas with a brush.  To speed the waxing process the cloth is stretched over a bamboo frame and the wax kept hot on a small charcoal stove.  When one side of the cloth has been waxed it is turned over and rewaxed on the reverse side.

Original Indian yellow was obtained at Monghyr, a town in Benghal, from the urine of cows which had been fed on mango leaves.  It was found in the bazaars of Panjab in the form of large balls, having an offensive urinous odour.  True Indian yellow has been absent from the market for some time; its production is said to have been prohibited in 1908. 

For more than one thousand years, the Chinese have made machines which print their writings on great papers made from the mulberry.  These papers are printed with the use of wooden blocks.  Black printed specimens exist from the earliest kingdoms.  Many of their printings use silver and gold letters, where a gum is first block-printed and then immediately printed over with extremely thin sheets of these metals.

Pakistan: Sutlej, Jhelum, Ravi, Chenab, Beas, the five rivers of the Punjab; Islamabad (the capital), Friday bazaar JUMA; muezzins.  Islamic chanting, calling the faithful to prayer. 

Especially Praslin Island in the Seychelles for the coco-de-mer palm -up to one and a half chain-lengths in height and 800 years in age, nuts to half a peck.  These great seeds are considered by Indian peoples to be sacred.  Also found here are curious climbing crabs, and the Screw pine with its roots extending above the earth.

contorted holly; alpine huck; contorted willow; hop vines; sea grape; passion vine; miscanthus (kaya); hemp (asa); butterbur (fuki); bracken (warabi); pampas (susuki)
India: hidden by mango trees; this riverbank towering in bamboo thickets overgrown with mild jasmine and lantana creepers; under the great trees, teak, peepul, silk cotton, banyan; the night blooming jasmine; the red blossoms shaken from the flame trees.  The Deodar tree.  Lemon blossoms and sandalwood.  Blue convolvulus, white jasmine, orange-pink lantana, floating in water.  A giant bamboo thicket. 

clumps of tall rheum; goatsbeard; purple-flowered asters; Ribe's white icicle; short golden bamboo; euphorbia; stonecrop; magnolia grandiflora; a corkscrew willow (salix matsundana); Lawson cypress (chamae cyparis) and a selective form of sequoiadendron giganteum pendula.  Yuccas, dwarf conifers with Japanese spurge (pachysandra terminalis).  A clump of purple fountain grass by the front gate (winter sensitive); a kiwi vine and evergreen clematis over the front of the house, and a staghorn sumac (rhus typhina) beside the porch steps.  Nest to the path, one metre high impatiens glandulifera (esp. seed pods).  A path beside the house leads past nandina domestica and fuchsia magelanica.  The back garden has a deeply shaded rock pool.  Dense plantings with stepping-stone curving paths.  Paulownia tomentosa, a monkey puzzle tree, corylus contorta chamaecyparis, asarum, styrax obassia; two mountain hemlocks; an old-fashioned transparent apple tree with its trunk smothered by ivy, assorted rhododenderons, azaleas, ferns and conifers.  Alstromeria, campanula, under the slender white barks of tall birch trees. 

Closely woven, thin cloths work best in the dyeing; the cottons and the kinu cloth made by the white worms.  Heavy cloths require waxing on both sides of the cloth, and much dye. The soils of galiche, caliche for its white binding agent, and as congregate; talus [gila conglomerate] yucca; sotol; agave; pinole; ground meal of the dried pods of the catclaw acacia (acacia greggi); tomatillo (wolfberry); cf tomato; honey; ocotillo; fouquieria splendens (a candlewood); jojoba (dioecious: male and female flowers are found on separate plants), nuts are a wax source; yucca baccata for its root soap (banana yucca); thornapple; datura; jimson weed

colour, tinge; make of specified colour; take dye.  n. hue; colouring-matter used for colour produced by, dyeing. 

dimity  morocain  samite  serge  surah  worsted  sateen  barracan  brabant  buckram  cambric  drugget  frieze  etamine  calamanco  brabant  kiito (raw silk)  bombazines  boccasini  damask galabiya  mufti  diadem  burock (burqa burka)  caftan  kufiya  burnoose  guipure aizome   indigo  cypress  Brahman  orange  soga  Javanian  ochre  Borneo  sago  tree  bark  madder  gentian  cappagh  bistre  soga  aizome  cypress

Indian Ink from China to Europe in the late seventeenth century.  Ground charcoal made from grape vines;  the boiled soot of hawthorn wood.

CURSIVE "GRASS" SCRIPT, with subcategories which must include cursive TA-CHUAN/HSIAO-CHUAN and cursive CH'ENG MIAO scripts.  Exceptionally includes a K'UANG TS'AO (WILD CURSIVE).  The features shared by all cursive styles are a simplified structure, running together of strokes, rapidly written and flowing lines, and a low level of legibility.  School founders are Wang Hsien-chih [Ch'in dynasty], Huai Su [T'ang dynasty] (725-785 AD) and Yu Yu-jen (1879-1964). 

The Nippons developed ways of printing and papermaking after the ways of the Chinese techniques.  These similar means of papermaking are used throughout East Asia.  In the Nippons, the wooden printing blocks are made of sakura mokusei, soft enough to carve, but strong enough to maintain detail over successive printings.  As many as twenty blocks are used to print their patterned papers.

kento   a pair of marks cut in relief on the key block, and incorporated into each colour block
hosho   paper derived from the inner bark of the mulberry tree, sufficiently strong and thick to withstand printing with numerous colour blocks, and absorbent enough to take up the inks.  Main colours came from vegetable and mineral sources. 

The Chinese king's burial tomb containing the most precious clothing ever excavated in the world; a collection of jade pieces; a great number of exquisite bells

ka [Egypt.]   cf pneuma [Gk.] (breath); one's individuality, one's ideal image of one's own life.  It may survive death only in connection with the personal body (which is why ancient Egyptians were so anxious to preserve their corpses).   cf ba, khu

After dyeing and drying, part of the layer of wax is carefully peeled off with a knife.  This reveals the white cloth underneath.  Another layer of wax is then applied to protect any parts of the design needing to be kept in the first dye colour, which is often a deep blue.  The cloth is then immersed in a second dye-bath, often containing soga brown, a vegetable colour from a Sunda plant.  The resulting pattern is then in dark blue, rich brown and bluish black.  The wax is finally removed from the cloth by steaming, and the fabric is glazed, being rubbed and polished with the edges of a turbo. 

Aniline Dyes (since 1870)

The following titles have assisted in this writing:  Ackerman, Diane   A Natural History of Love Random House, New York: 1994.Bemiss, Elijah   The Dyer's Companion Dover Publications, Inc., New York: 1815.Boorstin, Daniel J.,   The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Vintage Books, New York: 1992.Caracciolo-Trejo, E.   The Penguin Book of Latin American Verse Penguin Books Ltd., Baltimore: 1971.Cohen, J. M.   The Penguin Book of Spanish Verse Penguin Books Ltd., Baltimore: 1960.Fraser, James George   The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion Simon and Schuster Editions, New York: 1950.Marsden, William (transl.)   The Travels of Marco Polo the Venetian Doubleday and Co., New York: 1948.Matthiessen, Peter   The Snow Leopard Shambhala Publications, Boston: 1989.Monegal, Emir Rodriguez and Reid, Alastair, eds.   Borges: A Reader: A Selection from the Writings of Jorge Luis Borges E. P. Dutton, New York: 1981.Rutschowscaya, Marie-Helene   Coptic Fabrics Editions Adam Biro, Paris: 1990.Schetky, EthelJane   Dye Plants and Dyeing, A Handbook Brooklyn Botanic Garden, New York: 1964.Sutherland, Brain   Glazes from Natural Sources: A Working Handbook for Potters B. T. Batsford Ltd., London: 1987.Veyne, Paul   A History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium Harvard University Press, Cambridge: 1987.