1Far to the east of the snow mountains, in the land of the Yellow River, the house of Zhou had ruled for five hundred years, and it was dying. The king still sat in his city of Luoyang, but the lords of the states no longer listened to him. They fought one another every spring.
2West of the king's city the road climbed into yellow hills and came to a pass. The gorge was so narrow there that two carts could not go through side by side. A gate of timber stood across it, with a tower above. Beyond the gate lay the wild west, where no writ of Zhou ran.
3The keeper of the pass was named Yin Xi. He was a quiet man of middle years, who spent his nights on the tower watching the stars and the weather, and his days collecting the toll. Under him served eight soldiers. The youngest was named Shu.
4Shu was twenty-two, a farmer's son, taken for the army at sixteen. He could not read. He had a quick temper, and one great grievance. His captain, who lived at the fort below the hills, held back a third of the men's grain pay each season and sold it. Shu had been lying awake over it for six years. He had worked out a hundred speeches to the captain and three ways to kill him, and used none of them.
5That year an order had come up from the capital. No officer of the court was to leave the kingdom. Too many had slipped away with what they knew. Whoever stopped one would have a reward of silver and a step in rank. Shu had heard that order read aloud and had learned it by heart. A step in rank would take him off the pass. Silver would take him home.
6On an evening in the tenth month, with frost in the air, a traveller came up the road alone.
7He was very old. His eyebrows were white and hung down at the corners. He rode a dark ox, sitting sideways, without a saddle, and he had no baggage at all but a gourd and a rolled mat. He looked like a grandfather who had gone out to see his fields.
8Shu stood in the gate with his spear across it. "Name and business."
9"Li is my family," said the old man. "They call me Lao Dan. My business is finished. I am going west."
10"What were you, before your business finished?"
11"I kept the archives of the house of Zhou," said the old man, as another might say, I kept geese.
12Shu's heart jumped. The keeper of the royal archives. He could hardly have hoped for a fatter bird. He took hold of the ox's rope. "Then you are turned back, by the king's order. No officer leaves."
13He was ready for an argument. He rather hoped for one. But the old man only nodded. "Then I am turned back," he said, and he made a small sound to the ox, and the ox began to turn round in the road.
14Shu stood holding the rope and felt foolish. It was like putting his shoulder to a door that was not latched.
15"Wait," said a voice above. Yin Xi was coming down the tower stairs, faster than Shu had ever seen him move. He bowed to the old man, low, as to a teacher. "Lao Dan of the archives. I have read what was said of you. I had hoped, one day, that you might come this way." He turned to Shu. "The order says no officer shall leave carrying what belongs to the king. Search him."
16Shu searched. There was a gourd with water in it. There was a mat. There was an ox.
17"He carries it in his head," said Shu. "Forty years of the king's records."
18"That is so," said Yin Xi slowly. "Then the head must pay the toll." And he said to the old man: "Sir, you are about to go where no one will hear of you again. Before you go, I beg you: write down for me what you have understood. Leave it here. Then you carry nothing out that you have not also left behind, and I may open the gate with a clean heart."
19The old man looked at him for some time. "What I have understood does not go well into words," he said. "The words are a finger pointing. People keep the finger."
20"I know it," said Yin Xi. "Point anyway. I will try to look where it points."
21So the old man got down from his ox.
22He stayed nine days in the gatehouse. Now Shu had not waited for the keeper's leave to seek his reward. On the first night he sent word down to the fort by the grain carrier: the archivist of Zhou is at the pass. Then he was set to work, and the work was to serve the very man he had sold. He split bamboo and scraped the strips smooth. He ground the ink. He trimmed the lamp. And the old man sat on his mat and wrote, a few lines at a time, with long stillnesses between, and Yin Xi tied the finished strips together with cord.
23Shu could not read what was written. But he was in the room, and the old man sometimes spoke.
24On the third day Shu came in black with rage. The grain had come up from the fort, and again it was a third short. He threw down the bamboo so that it rang.
25"What is the matter with the bamboo?" said the old man.
26Shu told him. He told all of it, six years of it, the hundred speeches and the three ways. The old man listened without stopping his brush. When Shu had finished, he said, "Come and look at something."
27He took him out to the edge of the gorge. Far below, the stream ran among boulders. "Which is stronger," the old man asked, "the water or the stone?"
28"The stone. Throw one at your head and see."
29"Who made this gorge?"
30Shu looked down. He had stood guard above that gorge for six years. The walls of it were a hundred feet high and smooth as the inside of a jar. He had never once asked.
31"The water does not fight the stone," said the old man. "It goes to the low place that everyone despises. It goes round. It does not stop. In the end there is a gorge, and the stone is sand in the river." He looked at Shu sidelong. "Your captain has taken a third of your grain. That is his doing, and it is a wrong, and there may be something to be done about it. But who has taken your sleep for six years? He does not come up here at night to do that. You are doing his work for him, without pay."
32Shu did not like this. He said that it was easy for an old man with nothing to lose.
33"I had a great deal to lose," said the old man mildly. "I had rank, and a house, and the finest library under heaven. Do you know what is in the records of kings? The same story, a thousand times. A man takes hold of a thing. He grips it tighter, until all his strength goes into gripping, and in the end the thing is pulled from his hand anyway, and the hand is ruined. I did not wish to die still holding on to a shelf."
34On the seventh day the old man said, as he wrote, "A scholar from the state of Lu came to me once, to ask about the rites. A tall young man named Kong, very earnest, with a great many plans for setting the world right. I told him to put down his pride and half of his wishes. I was sharp with him. He will do good, that one, if he lives."
35On the ninth day, in the afternoon, the captain came up from the fort, and with him a rider from the capital in a lacquered breastplate, with four men.
36Shu saw them from the tower, and his belly turned over. He had sent for them. He had wanted this. He found that he did not want it now.
37The rider did not dismount at the gate. "Where is the archivist?"
38Yin Xi came out and bowed, without haste. "He is my guest. He has broken no order. The order forbids an officer to leave carrying what is the king's. He carries a gourd and a mat."
39"He carries the knowledge of the court."
40"He has left it here." Yin Xi held up the bundles of bamboo, two of them, each as thick as a man's arm. "Five thousand words. All that he understood in forty years. It stays in the kingdom. You may take a copy to the king."
41The rider snatched one bundle and unrolled a length of it. He read with his lips moving. His face darkened. "What is this? There are no names here. No treasuries, no boundaries, no lists of the lords and their oaths. This is riddles. It is about water. It is about valleys, and an uncarved block of wood." He threw the bundle down. "He is hiding the true records. Bring him out. A few strokes of the rod will find his memory."
42The old man had come to the door of the gatehouse. He stood there with his hands in his sleeves, and looked at the rider with interest, and said nothing at all.
43The captain stepped forward with the rod. And Shu, who had sworn three ways of killing that captain, found himself standing between.
44He had not planned it. His hand was on his sword. All six years were in that hand. The captain's throat was an arm's length away, and Shu's grievance was just, and he was quicker than the captain. He saw exactly how it would go. He would strike. The four men would cut him down. Yin Xi would hang for his soldier's crime. The old man would be beaten and dragged east. And the captain's cousin would take the fort, and hold back the grain.
45He saw all of that in the time of one breath. And he saw it because, for nine days, an old man had been asking him small questions, and some stiff place in his head had come loose.
46He took his hand off the sword. He let both hands hang open at his sides.
47"I sent the word," he said. His voice was not steady, but it was loud enough. "I wanted the reward. I was wrong about what he is. I have served him nine days. He has nothing you are looking for. He wrote what is on those strips, and there is nothing else. Search the ox again. Search me."
48The captain struck him across the face with the rod. Shu's head rang, and he tasted blood. He stood. The captain struck again. He stood. He was not thinking of water or of gorges. He was thinking only: I will not move, and I will not strike, and I will see what happens then.
49What happened was that the rider grew bored. A soldier who will not fight back or fall down is poor sport, and the capital was ten days off. He looked once more at the old man in the doorway, mild and white-browed and plainly useless to any king. "An old fool with a bundle of riddles," he said, and turned his horse. The captain lowered his rod. He told Shu that it would cost him a year's grain, and he followed the rider down the hill.
50Shu sat down on the ground with his hand to his face.
51The old man came and looked at the cut. "You went round," he said. That was all his praise. But he fetched water in the gourd and washed it himself.
52He left before sunrise. Yin Xi opened the gate with his own hands. The old man climbed onto the ox, sideways, as he had come.
53"Where will you go?" Shu asked.
54"West."
55"What is there?"
56"I do not know," said the old man. "I have read about everywhere else."
57Shu held the ox's rope a moment longer. He wanted something to keep, and did not know how to ask for it. "Sir. Is there no word for me? You gave five thousand to the keeper."
58"They are yours as much as his. They are for anyone."
59"I cannot read."
60"No," said the old man. "That is a closed gate. But you are a gate soldier. You know what to do with one." He touched the ox with his heel. He went through the opening, where there was nothing, and up the road into the yellow hills, and the mist took him. No one in the Middle Kingdom ever said for certain that they saw him again.
61That is the story, as the historians of that land set it down four hundred years after. I will tell you honestly that some of the learned doubt it. Some say there was no such old man, or that the book was gathered by many hands. I cannot settle it. But the book is real; you may hold it. It has outlasted every king whose treasuries the rider wished to count.
62Shu paid his year's grain. He ate thin that winter. But Yin Xi kept a lamp burning in the gatehouse through the long nights, the same lamp the old man had written by, and beside it he taught his youngest soldier his characters, with the bamboo strips for a copybook. It went slowly. Shu had a farmer's hands.
63It was more than a year before he read a whole passage by himself, without help. He read it aloud, one finger moving down the strip, and when he came to the end he sat very still:
64"He who knows others is clever; he who knows himself has discernment. He who overcomes others has force; he who overcomes himself is strong."
65"He wrote that on the third day," said Yin Xi. "The day you threw down the bamboo."
66Shu read it again. He thought of six years of lying awake, studying his captain. He knew that man's every fault and habit. He had never once studied the one who lay there in the dark.
67In time Shu made a copy of the whole book in his own slow hand, and a salt merchant carried it east. Others copied that one. The words went down out of the hills into the warring states, from hand to hand, like a coal carried under ash.