1Now turn your face to the east, as far east as the land goes. For the fire was never in one country only. While Baghdad copied and Cairo tested, there was a people beyond the deserts and the roof of the world who had never heard of Euclid, and had lit a great lamp of their own.
2They were the people of Song, who had paper before anyone, and who chose their officials not by birth but by a trial of writing. One who passed that trial with honour was a man named Shen Kuo. He had a mind like a market with a hundred stalls. He drained marshes and built dikes. He set the emperor's calendar in order. He rode north as an envoy to the horse-lords of the steppe and out-argued them over a border with their own maps. Whatever he was set to, he looked at as if no one had looked at it before.
3When he was fifty the emperor made him a commander on the north-west frontier, at a town called Yanzhou, where the land of Song ended in yellow hills and the land of the Tangut riders began. He was good at that also, for a time.
4Then came the matter of the fort.
5An officer greater than Shen Kuo came out from the capital with orders to build a new stronghold far forward in the enemy's hills. The place he chose was called Yongle. It stood high and looked strong. It had one fault. The water was outside the walls.
6Others warned against it. Shen Kuo saw the fault as plainly as he saw everything, and he did not stop it. He let a greater man have his way. The walls went up in fourteen days.
7The Tangut came down on it with a host that covered the hills. They did not need to storm the walls. They took the stream and sat down to wait.
8A rider got through to Yanzhou on the ninth night. Shen Kuo heard his report standing, by one lamp. Inside Yongle the wells they had dug were dry. Men were wringing out horse dung for the wet in it. Half were already dead of thirst. They begged him to come.
9He had too few soldiers, and the enemy lay between, and another town at his back would fall if he left it. He reckoned it every way. He was a great reckoner. Every way he reckoned it, he could not reach them.
10Yongle fell in the rain. It is a bitter thing: the rain came at last, on the night the walls were breached, and softened them. More than ten thousand men of Song died there, soldiers and labourers. The officer who had chosen the ground died with them.
11Someone living had to carry the blame. Shen Kuo was stripped of his rank and sent to a small town in the south to live under watch. He was forbidden the capital. He was forbidden office. The friends of his great years found, one by one, that they had forgotten his address.
12He did not say the judgment was unjust. He had seen that the water was outside the walls, and he had held his tongue.
13For six years he lived so. He finished a great map of the whole empire, which he had been ordered to make long before, and for that the court loosed his chain a little. He was allowed to live where he chose.
14Now years earlier, in his good days, he had bought a piece of land near the great river, by the town of Runzhou. He had bought it unseen, on another man's word. He went to look at it at last, an old man with nowhere else to go.
15There was a hill with old trees, and a clear brook winding under it. He stood and stared. For thirty years he had dreamed, again and again, of walking in a certain garden by a certain stream, and waking sorry to leave it. It was only a dream, and a place can be like a dream by chance. But he wept, and said, "This is where I am to stay." He named the stream Dream Brook, and built a small house, and shut the gate.
16He had no one to talk to. He wrote that himself, without complaint: that in his retirement under the trees his only companions in conversation were his brush and his inkstone.
17A man who has been listened to by emperors does not easily learn to be listened to by an inkstone. For a season he wrote nothing. He sat by the brook and saw Yongle. He counted the dead. He thought: I knew so much, and it saved no one. What was all that knowing for?
18In the autumn of that year his brother's son came to visit him. He was a young man of no great rank, shy of his famous and ruined uncle. He carried a wooden case, heavy, the size of a writing desk.
19"Uncle," he said, "you used to ask about everything. I thought you might know what this is worth. It came into our family years ago, from an old man who died. We have kept it carefully. We do not quite know why."
20He set the case on the table and slid back the lid.
21Inside were rows of small paper labels, and under each label a nest of little grey tablets, thousands of them. Shen Kuo picked one up. It was baked clay, hard as pottery, thin as the edge of a coin. On its face, raised and backward, was a single written character: mountain.
22"Who made these?" he said. His voice had changed. It was the voice he had used with engineers.
23"A man named Bi Sheng," said the nephew. "It was in the reign of the old emperor, forty years back. He was no one, uncle. A commoner. He wore plain cloth."
24You must understand what books were in that country. The people of Song already printed. But they printed by carving a whole page, every stroke of it, backward into a block of pear wood. A good carver might cut one block in a day. One slip of the knife and the block was spoiled. And when the book was done, the blocks were good for that book and no other, and they filled a storehouse.
25"Tell me how he used them," said Shen Kuo. "Everything. Leave nothing out."
26The nephew told what he had been told. Bi Sheng took an iron plate and spread it with a paste of pine resin and wax and paper ash. He set an iron frame on it. Into the frame he set his clay characters one by one, side by side, in the order of the text, until the frame was full. Then he warmed the plate at a fire. The paste softened. He pressed a flat board down on the faces, so that they stood level as a whetstone. When the plate cooled, the characters were fast.
27He inked it and laid paper on it and rubbed. A page. Again. Another page, the same. A hundred. A thousand.
28"And then?"
29"Then he warmed the plate again, uncle, and the paste melted, and he brushed the characters off with his hand, and they fell away clean. He put each back under its label. And set them again for the next page. He kept two plates. While one was printing, a helper was setting the other. He said for two or three copies it was no gain. But for hundreds or thousands it was as quick as a god."
30Shen Kuo sat very still, with the clay word for mountain in his palm.
31He saw it whole, as he saw everything. A page was not one thing. A page was many small things that could be taken apart and joined again in another order, without end. A man need not carve a book. He need only arrange it. The same three thousand bits of clay could be the Analects in the morning and a farmer's almanac at night.
32"Why does no one use it?" he said.
33"He died," said the nephew. "He had no pupils of any name. The printers have their blocks and their carvers, and they are content. No scholar wrote of him. Who writes about a man in plain cloth?"
34Shen Kuo looked across the table at his brush and his inkstone. It is told in his book in a few plain lines, and he does not say what he felt. But it was in that garden, in those years, that the ruined minister began to write, and he did not write of emperors. He wrote, in more than five hundred short pieces, about everything he had ever stopped to look at, and everything that people without rank had shown him.
35He wrote of Bi Sheng first among the makers. He set down the resin and the wax and the paper ash, the iron frame, the two plates, the labels sorted by the sound of the words. He set down why Bi Sheng had not used wood for his letters: that wood drinks the ink, and swells unevenly, and sticks in the paste. He wrote it all so plainly that a stranger could do it again from the page. And he gave the man his name, and wrote a man in plain cloth, so that it would never be said a lord had done it.
36He ended with one line: that when Bi Sheng died, his type came into the keeping of Shen Kuo's own young kinsmen, and was treasured by them still.
37Then he wrote about the needle.
38The diviners of his country, who chose lucky ground for graves, had a trick. They rubbed the point of an iron needle on a lodestone, and after that the needle would turn of itself and point to the south. Learned men thought it a fortune-teller's toy. Shen Kuo hung one from a single thread of new silk, fixed to the middle of the needle with a speck of wax, in a place with no wind. He watched it. He watched many.
39And he wrote down a thing no one in the world had written before: that the needle does not point truly south. It leans always a little to the east. He did not know why. He said so. He wrote that no one could yet say the reason of it, and he left it there, a door standing open in the middle of a page.
40On an embassy long before, riding under the cliffs of the Taihang mountains, he had seen a band of shells in the rock, and smooth round stones such as a shore has, running level across the cliff for miles. The sea was a thousand li to the east. He wrote that this had once been the edge of the sea; that all the wide plain between must have been laid down since, grain by grain, by the mud of the rivers. He looked at a cliff and saw time.
41And he wrote of Yanzhou. He made himself write that name.
42Two years before the fort fell, a river bank had collapsed near the town, and opened the earth to the depth of several tens of feet. And there, far under the ground, the labourers had found a forest: hundreds of stems of bamboo, with their roots and trunks whole, all turned to stone. Now no bamboo grows at Yanzhou. It is dry yellow country. Bamboo wants wet and warmth.
43The soldiers had thought it an omen. Their commander had got down into the pit himself and handled the stone stems and thought: perhaps in very ancient times this place was low and damp and warm. Perhaps the sky itself was different here once. The earth is not as it always was, and will not stay as it is.
44He wrote it down in the garden, years after. He wrote of the stone bamboo and not of the ten thousand dead. But he knew, as he wrote, that it was the same ground. He had stood in that country and seen a thousand ages back with a clear eye. And he had stood in that same country and not said aloud, to a greater man's face, that the water was outside the walls.
45To see is one flame. To stand is another. He had kept the first all his life and let the second go out for a single afternoon, and Yongle was the price of the afternoon.
46He could not unbuild the fort. That was in the Far Hand now, with all things that are past. What was left in the Near Hand was a brush, and what he knew, and the years that remained. So he gave away what he knew: to anyone, of any rank, in any age, who could read. He hid nothing. Where he was unsure, he wrote that he was unsure. Where a commoner had been wiser than the court, he wrote the commoner's name.
47He called the book after the brook: Brush Talks from Dream Brook. For he said that he had only his brush to talk with. But a man who writes plainly for strangers is not talking to a brush. He is talking to them. He had more company in that garden than he knew.
48He lived there seven years, and died, and was not much mourned at court. Now hear what became of the things he saved.
49The needle went to sea. Within a lifetime of his writing, the shipmasters of the southern coast were steering by it under cloud, when no star showed. In time, by what hands no one can now say, it was on the ships of the Arabs also, and on the ships of the far west. Hold that in your mind. It will matter in the next book.
50And the clay letters of Bi Sheng? They were lost. No one knows when. His nephews' sons, or theirs, let the case go, and the little grey words went back to the earth they were made from. Not one has ever been found.
51But the page that Shen Kuo wrote about them was not lost. It was cut in pear wood, as it happens, in the old slow way, and printed, and printed again. Three hundred words, saying: a page can be taken apart. A man in plain cloth showed how. Others in that country read it and tried the thing again in wood, and in tin, and in bronze.
52And far to the west, in a land that did not yet have even paper, the idea was waiting to be found a second time, by a worker in metal who would never hear the name of Bi Sheng.
53Now hear what came after.