The Rings of Saturn

6. The bridge over the Blyth — The Chinese court train — The Taiping rebellion and the opening of China — Destruction of the garden of Yuan Ming Yuan — The end of Emperor Hsien-feng — The Dowager Empress Tz'u-hsi — Mysteries of power — The town beneath the sea — Poor Algernon

Not far from the coast, between Southwold and Walberswick, a narrow iron bridge crosses the river Blyth where a long

time ago ships heavily laden with wool made their way seaward. Today there is next to no traffic on the river, which is largely silted up. At best one might see a sailing boat or two moored in the lower reaches amidst an assortment of rotting barges. To landward, there is nothing but grey water, mudflats and emptiness.

The bridge over the Blyth was built in 1875 for a narrow-gauge railway that linked Halesworth and Southwold. According to local historians, the train that ran on it had originally been built for the Emperor of China. Precisely which emperor had given this commission I have not succeeded in finding out, despite lengthy research; nor have I been able to discover why the order was never delivered or why this diminutive imperial train, which may have been intended to connect the Palace in Peking, then still surrounded by pinewoods, to one of the summer residences, ended up in service on a branch line of the Great Eastern Railway. The only thing the uncertain sources agree on is that the outlines of the imperial heraldic dragon, complete with a tail and somewhat clouded over by its own breath, could clearly be made out beneath the black paintwork of the carriages, which were used mainly by seaside holidaymakers and travelled at a maximum speed of sixteen miles per hour. As for the heraldic creature itself, the Libro de los seres imaginarios, to which reference has already been made, contains a fairly complete taxonomy and description of oriental dragons, of those that inhabit the skies and of those that dwell on the earth and in the seas. Some are said to carry the palaces of the gods on their backs, while others are believed to determine the course of streams and rivers and to guard subterranean treasures. They are armour-plated with yellow scales. Below their muzzles they have beards, their brows beetle over their blazing eyes, their ears are short and fleshy, their mouths invariably hang open, and they feed on pearls and opals. Some are three or four miles long. Mountains crumble when they turn over in their sleep, and when they fly through the air, they cause terrible storms that strip the roofs off houses and devastate the crops. When they rise from the depths of the sea, maelstroms and typhoons ensue. In China, the placating of the elements has always been intimately connected with the ceremonial rites which surrounded the ruler on the dragon throne and which governed everything from affairs of state down to daily ablutions, rituals that also served to legitimize and immortalize the immense profane power that was focused in the person of the emperor. At any moment of the day or night, the members of the imperial household, which numbered more than six thousand and consisted exclusively of eunuchs and women, would be circling, on precisely defined orbits, the sole male inhabitant of the Forbidden City that lay concealed behind purple-coloured walls. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the ritualization of imperial power was at its most elaborate: at the same time, that power itself was by now almost completely hollowed out. While all court appointments, rigidly controlled as they were by an immutable hierarchy, continued to be made according to rules that had been perfected down to the last detail, the empire in its entirety was on the brink of collapse, owing to mounting pressure from enemies both within and without. In the 1850s and 1860s, the Taiping rebellion, launched by a messianic Christian-Confucian movement, spread like wildfire across all of southern China. Reeling with privation and poverty, the people — from starving peasants and soldiers at large after the Opium war to coolies, sailors, actors and prostitutes — flocked in undreamt-of numbers to the self-appointed Celestial King, Hung Hsiu-Ch'üan, who in a feverish delirium had beheld a glorious future in which justice prevailed. Soon a steadily growing army of holy warriors was making its way northwards from Kwangsi. It overran the provinces of Hunan, Hupeh and Anhwei, and in early 1853 was at the gates of the mighty city of Nanking, which was overwhelmed after a tow-day siege and was declared the celestial capital of the movement. Fired by the prospect of a golden age, the rebellion now flooded wave upon wave across the whole vast country. More than six thousand citadels were taken by the rebels and occupied for a while; five provinces were razed to the ground in battle after battle; and more than twenty million died in just fifteen years. The bloody horror in China at that time went beyond all imagining. In the summer of 1864, after a seven-year siege by imperial forces, Nanking fell. The defenders had long since exhausted their supplies, and had abandoned all hope of attaining in this life the paradise which had seemed within reach when the movement began. Broken by hunger and drugs, they were on their last legs. On the 30th of June the Celestial King took his own life. Hundreds of thousands followed his example, either out of loyalty or for fear of the conquerors' revenge. They committed self-slaughter in every conceivable way, with swords and with knives, by fire, by hanging, or by leaping from the rooftops and towers. Many are even said to have buried themselves alive. The mass suicide of the Taipingis is without historical parallel. When their enemies broke through the gates on the morning of the 19th of July, they found not a soul alive. But the city was filled with the humming of flies. The king of the Celestial Realm of Eternal Peace, according to a despatch sent to Peking, lay face-down in a gutter, his bloated body held together only by the silken robes of imperial yellow, adorned with the image of the dragon, which, with blasphemous presumption, he had always worn.

Suppressing the Taiping rebellion would almost certainly have proved impossible had not the British army contingents in China taken the imperial side after the resolution of their own conflict with the Emperor. The armed presence of the British dated back to 1840, to the beginning of the so-called Opium war. In 1837 the Chinese government had taken measures to prevent opium trading, whereupon the East India Company, which grew opium poppies in the fields of Bengal and shipped the drug mainly to Canton, Amoy and Shanghai, felt that one of its most lucrative ventures was in jeopardy. The subsequent declaration of war began the opening-up, by force of arms, of the Chinese Empire, which for two hundred years had remained closed to foreign barbarians. In the name of Christian evangelism and free trade, which was held to be the precondition of all civilized progress, the superiority of western artillery was demonstrated, a number of cities were stormed, and a peace was extorted, the conditions of which included guarantees for British trading posts on the coast, the cession of Hong Kong, and, not least, reparation payments of truly astronomical proportions. In so far as this arrangement, which from the outset the British regarded as purely interim, made no provision for access to trading centres within China itself, the need for further military campaigns could not be ruled out in the longer term, especially in view of the existence of four hundred million Chinese to whom the cotton fabrics produced in the Lancashire mills might have been sold. It was not, however, until 1856 that an adequate pretext for a new punitive expedition presented itself, when Chinese officials in the port of Canton boarded a freighter to arrest some members of the all-Chinese crew who were suspected of piracy. In the course of this operation, the boarding party hauled down the Union Jack, which was flying from the main mast, probably because at that time the British flag was not infrequently flown as cover for illegal trafficking. But since the boarded ship was registered in Hong Kong and was flying the Union Jack rightfully, the incident, laughable in itself, provided the representatives of British interests in Canton with the occasion for a confrontation with the Chinese authorities which was presently and deliberately pushed so far that there was felt to be no alternative but to occupy the port and bombard the official residence of the prefect. At very nearly the same time, as luck would have it, the French press was running reports of the execution, on the orders of officials in Kwangsi province, of a missionary named Chapdelaine. The description of this painful procedure culminated in the claim that the executioner had cut the heart from the breast of the dead abbé, and cooked and eaten it. The cries for retaliation and punishment which promptly filled France chimed perfectly with the endeavours of the warmongers in Westminster, so that, once the necessary preparations had been made, there was witnessed the spectacle of a joint Anglo-French campaign, a rare phenomenon in the age of imperial rivalry. This enterprise, which was dogged by the greatest of logistical difficulties, entered its crucial phase in August 1860 with the landing of eighteen thousand British and French troops in the Bay of Pechili, barely a hundred and fifty miles from Peking. Supported by a Chinese auxiliary force recruited in Canton, they captured the forst of Taku that stood surrounded by deep ditches, immense earthworks and bamboo palisades amidst saltwater marshes at the mouth of the Peiho river. After the fortress garrison had unconditionally surrendered and attempts were being made to put an orderly end, by negotiation, to a campaign that had already been concluded from a military point of view, the allied delegates, despite the fact that they had the upper hand, became ever more lost in a nightmarish maze of diplomatic prevarication dictated partly by the complex requirements of protocol in the dragon empire and partly by the fear and bewilderment of the Emperor. In the end, the negotiations foundered on the mutual incomprehension of emissaries from two fundamentally different worlds, a gap which no interpreter could bridge. While the British and French side viewed the peace they would impose as the first stage in the colonization of a moribund realm untouched by the intellectual and material achievements of civilization, the Emperor's delegates, for their part, endeavoured to make clear to these strangers, who appeared to be unfamiliar with Chinese ways, the immemorial obligations toward the Son of Heaven of envoys from satellite powers bound to pay homage and tribute. In the end, there was nothing for it but to sail up the Peiho in gunboats and advance on Peking overland. Emperor Hsien-feng, who was debilitated despite his youthful years and suffered from dropsy, shirked the impending confrontation, departing on the 22nd of September for his retreat at Jehol beyond the Great Wall amidst a disorderly array of court eunuchs, mules, baggage carts, litters and palanquins. Word was conveyed to the commanders of the enemy forces that his majest the Emperor was obliged by law to go hunting in autumn. In early October the allied troops, themselves now uncertain how to proceed, happened apparently by chance on the magic garden of Yuan Ming Yuan near Peking, with its countless palaces, pavilions, covered walks, fantastic arbours, temples and towers. On the slopes of man-made mountains, between banks and spinneys, deer with fabulous antlers grazed, and the whole incomprehensible glory of Nature and of the wonders placed in it by the hand of man was reflected in dark, unruffled waters. The destruction that was wrought in these legendary landscaped gardens over the next few days, which made a mockery of military discipline or indeed of all reason, can only be understood as resulting from anger at the continued delay in achieving a resolution. yet the true reason why Yuan Ming Yuan was laid waste may well have been that this earthly paradise — which immediately annihilated any notion of the Chinese as an inferior and uncivilized race — was an irresistible provocation in the eyes of soldiers who, a world away from their homeland, knew nothing about the rule of force, privation, and the abnegation of their own desires. Although the accounts of what happened in those October days are not very reliable, the sheer fact that booty was later auctioned off in the British camp suggests that much of the removable ornaments and the jewellery left behind by the fleeing court, everything made of jade or gold, silver or silk, fell into the hands of the looters. When the summerhouses, hunting lodges and sacred places in the extensive gardens and neighbouring palace precincts, more than two hundred in number, were then burnt to the ground, it was on the orders of the commanding officers, ostensibly in reprisal for the mistreatment of the British emissaries Loch and Parkes, but in reality so that the devastation already wrought should no longer be apparent. The temples, palaces and hermitages, mostly built of cedarwood, went up in flames one after another with unbelievable speed, according to Charles George Gordon, a thirty-year-old captain in the Royal Engineers, the fire spreading through the green shrubs and woods, crackling and leaping. Apart from a few stone bridges and marble pagodas, all was destroyed. For a long time, swathes of smoke drifted over the entire area, and a great cloud of ash that obscured the sun was borne to Peking by the west wind, where after a time it settled on the heads and homes of those who, it was surmised, had been visited by the power of divine retribution. At the end of the month, with the example of Yuan Ming Yuan before them, the Emperor's officers felt obliged to sign without further ado the oft-deferred Treaty of Tientsin. The principal clauses, apart from fresh reparation demands that could scarcely be met, related to the rights of free movement and unhindered missionary activity in the interior of China and to negotiation of a customs tariff with a view to legalizing the opium trade. In return, the Western powers declared themselves willing to uphold the dynasty, which meant putting down the Taiping rebellion and crushing the secessionary movements of the Moslem population of the Shensi, Yunnan and Kansu valley regions, in the course of which between six and ten million people were made homeless or killed. Charles George Gordon, by nature shy and Christian-spirited, though also an irascible and profoundly melancholy man, who was later to die a famous death in the siege of Khartoum, took over the command of the demoralized imperial army and within a short period transformed into so powerful a fighting force that when he left the country he was invested with the Chinese Empire's highest decoration in recognition of his services, the yellow jacket.

In August 1861, after months of irresolution, Emperor Hsien-feng lay in his Jehol exile approaching the end of his short and dissipated life. The waters had already risen from his abdomen to his heart, and the cells of his gradually dissolving flesh floated like fish in the sea in the salt fluid that leaked from his bloodstream into every available space in the body tissue. Through his flickering consciousness, Hsien-feng followed the invasion by foreign powers of the provinces of his empire by perfect proxy, as his own limbs died off and his organs flooded with toxins. He himself was now the battlefield on which the downfall of China was being accomplished, till on the 22nd of the month the shades of night settled upon him and he sank away wholly into the delirium of death. Because of the precisely ordained procedures to which the Emperor's body had to be subjected before being placed in its coffin, procedures which were linked to complex astrological calculations, transfer of his corpse to Peking could not be arranged before the 5th of October. It then took three weeks for the cortège, more than a mile long, to make the journey, in evenly falling autumn rain, up hill and down dale, through black valleys and gorges and across bleak mountain passes blurred to sight by icy-grey blizzards. The catafalque, which time and again threatened to topple over, was borne on a huge golden bier on the shoulders of a hundred and twenty-four hand-picked pallbearers. On the morning of the 1st of November, when the cortège reached its destination, the road leading to the gates of the Forbidden City had been strewn with yellow sand and screens of blue Nanking silk were positioned on either side to prevent the common people from looking upon the countenance of the five-year-old child Emperor T'ung-chih, whom Hsien-feng had named as his successor to the dragon throne in the last days of his life and who was now being taken homeward on a padded palanquin behind the mortal remains of his father, together with his mother Tz'u-hsi, who had risen from the ranks of concubines and even now had assumed the illustrious title of Dowager Empress. Following the return to court in Peking, the struggle for the powers of regency during the interregnum which inevitably ensued since the heir to the dragon throne was not yet of age, was soon resolved in favour of the widow, whose craving for power was insatiable. The princes who had acted as Hseien-feng's viceroys during his absence were accused of conspiracy against the legitimate ruler, a crime for which there was no defence, and they were condemned to be dismembered and cut into slices. When this sentence was commuted and the traitors were granted permission, offered to them in the form of a silken rope, to hang themselves, it was seen as a token of merciful clemency in the new regime. Once Princes Cheng, Su-shun and Yi had availed themselves of this prerogative, seemingly without any hesitation, the Dowager Empress was the uncontested locum of the Chinese Empire, at least until the time when her son became old enough to rule himself and began taking measures that ran counter to the plans she had nurtured to extend and perfect her power, plans of which many had already been put into practice. Given this turn of events, it was tantamount to providential, from Tz'u-hsi's point of view, that, a scant year after coming to the throne, T'ung-chih was so weakened — by smallpox or by some other disease he had picked up, as rumour had it, from the dancers and transvestites of Peking's streets of sin — that when the planet Venus crossed before the sun in the autumn of 1874, a grim omen, there were fears for his life at the age of barely nineteen. And indeed T'ung-chih did die, a few weeks later, on the 12th of January 1875. His face was turned to the south and for the journey into the beyond he was enrobed in the vestments of eternal life. The funeral obsequies had scarcely been completed in the prescribed form when the wife of the departed Emperor, seventeen years old and several months pregnant according to various sources, poisoned herself with a massive dose of opium. The official version, that her mysterious death was due to the unassuageable grief that had overwhelmed her, could not entirely dispel the suspicion that the young Empress had been got out of the way in order to prolong the regency of the Dowager Empress Tz'u-hsi, who now consolidated her position by having her two-year-old nephew Kung-hsu proclaimed heir to the throne, a manoeuvre which flew in the face of tradition since Kuang-hsu was of the same generation as T'ung-chih in the lineage of descent, and thus, under an incontrovertible Confucian rule, unentitled to proffer the services of reverence and mourning which were owed the dead man that his spirit might be appeased. The way the Dowager Empress, in other respects extremely conservative in her views, contrived to flout the most venerable precepts when it became necessary, was one sign of her craving for absolute power, which grew more ruthless with every year that passed. And like all absolute rulers, she was concerned to display her exalted position to the world at large and to herself by a lavishness beyond comparison. Her private household alone, managed by senior eunuch Li Lien-ying, standing to her right in this picture,

went through a truly appalling annual sum of six million pounds sterling. The more ostentatious the demonstrations of her authority became, however, the more the fear of losing the infinite power she had so insidiously acquired grew within her. Unable to sleep, she roamed the bizarre shadow landscapes of the palace gardens, amidst the artificial crags, the groves of ferns, and the dark arborvitaes and cypresses. In the early morning she swallowed a pearl ground to powder, as an elixir of invulnerability. She took the greatest of pleasure in lifeless things, and by day would sometimes stand for hours at the windows of her apartments, staring out upon the silent lake to the north, which resembled a painting. The tiny figures of the gardeners in the distant lily fields, or those of the courtiers who skated on the blue ice in winter, did not recall to her the natural occupations and feelings of human kind, but were rather, like flies in a jam jar, already in the wanton power of death. Travellers who were in China between 1876 and 1879 report that, in the drought that had continued for years, whole provinces gave the impression of expiring under prisons of glass. Between seven and twenty million people — no precise estimates have ever been calculated — are said to have died of starvation and exhaustion, principally in Shansi, Shensi and Shantung. A Baptist preacher named Timothy Richard, for example, noted that one effect of the catastrophe, which grew more apparent week by week, was that all movement was slowing down. Singly, in groups and in straggling lines, people tottered across the country, and the merest breath of air might suffice to topple them and leave them lying by the wayside forever. Simply raising a hand, closing an eyelid, or exhaling one's last breath might take, it sometimes seemed, half a century. And as time dissolved, so too did all other relations. Parents exchanged children because they could not bear to watch the dying torment of their own. Towns and villages were surrounded by deserts of dust, over which trembling mirages of river valleys and forested lakes often appeared. Sometimes at first light, when the rustling of leaves dry on the branch penetrated their shallow sleep, people imagined, for a fraction of a second in which wishful thinking was stronger than what they knew to be the case, that it had started to rain. Though the capital and its environs were spared the worst consequences of the drought, when the ill tidings arrived from the south, the Dowager Empress had a daily blood sacrifice offered in her temple to the gods of silk, at the hour when the evening star rose, lest the silkworms want for fresh green leaves. Of all living creatures, these curious insects alone aroused a strong affection in her. The silk houses they were raised in were among the finest buildings of the summer palace. Every day that came, Tz'u-hsi walked the airy halls with the ladies of her retinue, clad in white pinafores, to inspect the progress of the work, and when night fell she particularly liked to sit all alone amidst the frames, listening to the low, even, deeply soothing sound of the countless silkworms consuming the new mulberry foliage. These pale, almost transparent creatures, which would presently give their lives for the fine thread they were spinning, she saw as her true loyal followers. To her they seemed the ideal subjects, diligent in service, ready to die, capable of multiplying vastly within a short span of time, and fixed on their one sole preordained aim, wholly unlike human beings, on whom there was basically no relying, neither on the nameless masses in the empire nor on those who constituted the inmost circle about her and who, she suspected might over at any time to the side of the second child Emperor she had installed. Kung-hsu who was fascinated by the mysteries of modern machines, spent most of his time taking apart the mechanical toys and clocks sold by a Danish tradesman in his Peking shop, and it was still possible to distract his awakening ambition by promising him a real railway train which he would be able to ride across his own country but the day was not long remote when his would be the power which she, the Dowager Empress, was ever less able to relinquish the longer she possessed it. As I imagine it, the little court train with the image of the Chinese dragon that later served the line from Halesworth to Southwold was originally ordered for Kuang-hsu, and the order was subsequently cancelled in the mid-1890s when the young Emperor began to espouse, in opposition to Tz'u-hsi, the causes of the reform movement under whose influence he had fallen, causes that ran counter to her own purposes. What we do have on authority is that Kuang-hsu's attempts to wrest power to himself ultimately led to his being imprisoned in one of the moated palaces in the Forbidden City, where he was forced to abdicate and make over the power of government, without reservation, to the Dowager Empress. For ten years Kuang-hsu languished in exile on his paradisiacal island until in the late summer of 1908, the various ailments that increasingly troubled him since the day of his deposition — chronic headaches and backache, renal cramps, hypersensitivity to light and noise, weak lungs, and severe depression — finally overcame him. One Dr Chu, who was familiar with western medicine and was the last to be consulted, diagnosed Bright's disease but also noted a number of inconsistent symptoms — palpitations of the heart, an empurpled complexion, a yellow tongue — that suggest, as has since been speculated, that Kuang-hsu was gradually poisoned. Visiting the patient in his imperial apartments, Dr Chu noticed moreover that the floors and all the furnishings were thick with dust, as if the house had been long since deserted, an indication that no one had attended to the Emperor's needs for years. On the 14th of November 1908 at dusk, or, as they say, at the hour of the cockerel, Kuang-hsu, racked with pain, departed this life. At the time of his death he was thirty-seven years old. Strangely enough, the seventy-three-year-old Dowager Empress, who had destroyed his body and his spirit with such persistent intent, outlived him by less than a day. On the morning of the 15th of November, still in reasonably good health, she presided over the grand council's deliberations upon the new situation, but after her midday meal, which in defiance of her personal doctors' warnings she had concluded with a double helping of her favourite pudding — crab apples with clotted cream — she was stricken with an attack resembling dysentery, from which she did not recover. She died at about three o'clock. Already draped in her shroud, she dictated her farewell to the Empire which now after the near half century of her regency was in the throes of dissolution. Looking back, she said, she realized that history consists of nothing but misfortune and the troubles that afflict us, so that in all our days on earth we never know one single moment that is genuinely free of fear.

The denial of time, so the tract on Orbius Tertius tells us, is one of the key tenets of the philosophical schools of Tlön. According to this principle, the future exists only in the shape of our present apprehensions and hopes, and the past merely as memory. In a different view, the world and everything now living in it was created only moments ago, together with its complete by illusory pre-history. A third school of thought variously describes our earth as a cul-de-sac in the great city of God, a dark cave crowded with incomprehensible images, or a hazy aura surrounding a better sun. The advocates of a fourth philosophy maintain that time has run its course and this life is no more than the fading reflection of an event beyond recall. We simply do not know how many of its possible mutations the world may already have gone through, or how much time, always assuming that it exists, remains. All that is certain is that night lasts far longer than day, if one compares an individual life, life as a whole, or time itself with the system which, in each case, is above it. The night of time, wrote Thomas Browne in his treatise of 1658, The Garden of Cyrus, far surpasseth the day and who knows when was the Aequinox? — Thoughts of this kind were in my head too as I walked on along the disused railway line a little way beyond the bridge across the Blyth, and then dropped from the higher ground to the level of the marsh that extends southward from Walberswick as far as Dunwich, which now consists of a few houses only. The region is so empty and deserted that, if one were abandoned there, one could scarcely say whether one was on the North Sea coast or perhaps by the Caspian Sea or the Gulf of Lian-tung. With the rippling reeds to my right and the grey beach to my left, I pressed on toward Dunwich, which seemed so far in the distance as to be quite beyond my reach.

It was as if I had been walking for hours before the tiled roofs of houses and the crest of a wooded hill gradually became defined. The Dunwich of the present day is what remains of a town that was one of the most important ports in Europe in the Middle Ages. There were more than fifty churches, monasteries and convents, and hospitals here; there were shipyards and fortifications and a fisheries and merchant fleet of eighty vessels; and there were dozens of windmills. All of it has gone under, quite literally, and is now below the sea, beneath alluvial sand and gravel, over an area of two or three square miles. The parish churches of St james, St Leonard, St Martin, St Bartholomew, St Michael, St Patrick, St Mary, St John, St Peter, St Nicholas and St Felix, one after the other, toppled down the steadily receding cliff-face and sank in the depths, along with the earth and stone of which the town had been built. All that survived, strange to say, were the walled well shafts, which for centuries, freed of that which had once enclosed them, rose aloft like the chimney stacks of some subterranean smithy, as various chroniclers report, until in due course these symbols of the vanished town also fell down. Until about 1890 what was known as Eccles Church Tower still stood on Dunwich beach,

and no one had any idea how it had arrived at sea level, from the considerable height at which it must once have stood, without tipping out of the perpendicular. The riddle had not been solved to this day, though a recent experiment using a model suggests that the enigmatic Eccles Tower was probably built on sand and sank down under its own weight, so gradually that the masonry remained virtually intact. Around 1900, after Eccles Tower had also collapsed, the only Dunwich church that remained was the ruin of All Saints.

In 1919 it, too, slipped over the cliff edge, together with the bones of those buried in the churchyard, and only the square west tower still rose for a time above those eerie parts. Dunwich reached the high point of its evolution in the thirteenth century. Every day, in those times, the ships came and went, to London, Stavoren, Stralsund, Danzig, Bruges, Bayonne and Bordeaux. A quarter of the great fleet that sailed from Portsmouth in May 1230, bearing hundreds of knights and their horses, several thousand foot soldiers, and the entire royal entourage, came from Dunwich. Shipbuilding, and the trade in timber, grain, salt, herring, wool and hides, were so profitable that the town was soon in a position to build every conceivable kind of defence against attack from the landward side and against the force of the sea, which was ceaselessly eroding the coast. One cannot say how great was the sense of security which the people of Dunwich derived from the building of these fortifications. All we know for certain is that they ultimately proved inadequate. On New Year's Eve 1285, a storm tide devastated the lower town and the portside so terribly that for months afterwards no one could tell where the land ended and the sea began. There were fallen walls, debris, ruins, broken timbers, shattered ships' hulls, and sodden masses of loam, pebbles, sand and water everywhere. And then on the 14th of January 1328, after only a few decades of rebuilding, and following an autumn and Christmas period that had been unusually tranquil, an even more fearful disaster occurred, if such were possible. Once again, a hurricane-force north-easterly storm coincided with the highest tide of the month. As darkness fell, those living around the harbour fled with whatever belongings they could carry to the upper town. All night the waves clawed away one row of houses after another. Like mighty battering rams the roofing and supporting beams adrift in the water smashed against the walls that had not yet been levelled. When dawn came, the throng of survivors — numbering some two or three thousand, among them gentry such as the FitzRicharts, the FitzMaurices, the Valeins and the de la Falaises as well as the common people — stood on the edge of the abyss, leaning into the wind, gazing in horror through the clouds of salt spray into the depths where bales and barrels, shattered cranes, torn sails of windmills, chests and tables, crates, feather beds, firewood, straw and drowned livestock were revolving in a whirlpool of whitish-brown waters. Over the centuries that followed, catastrophic incursions of the sea into the land of this kind happened time and again, and, even during long years of apparent calm, coastal erosion continued to take its natural course. Little by little the people of Dunwich accepted the inevitability of the process. They abandoned their hopeless struggle, turned their backs on the sea, and, whenever their declining means allowed it, built to the westward in a protracted flight that went on for generations; the slowly dying town thus followed — by reflect, one might say — one of the fundamental patterns of human behaviour. A strikingly large number of our settlements are oriented to the west, and where circumstances permit, relocate in a westward direction. The east stands for lost causes. Especially at the time when the continent of America was being colonized, it was noticeable that the townships spread to the west even as their eastern districts were falling apart. In Brazil, to this day, whole provinces die down like fires when the land is exhausted by overcropping and new areas to the west are opened up. In North America, too, countless settlements of various kinds, complete with gas stations, motels and shopping malls, move west along the turnpikes, and along that axis affluence and squalor are unfailingly polarized. I was put in mind of this phenomenon by the flight of Dunwich. After the first serious disaster, building began on the westernmost fringe of the town, but even of the Grey Friars monastery that dates from that time only a few fragments now remain. Dunwich, with its towers and many thousand souls, has dissolved into water, sand and thin air. If you look out from the cliff-top across the sea towards where the town must once have been, you can sense the immense power of emptiness. Perhaps it was for this reason that Dunwich became a place of pilgrimate for melancholy poets in the Victorian age. Algernon Charles Swinburne, for instance, went there on several occasions in the 1870s with his companion Theodore Watts-Dunton, whenever the excitement of London literary life threatened to overtax his nerves, which had been hypersensitive since his early childhood. He had achieved legendary fame as a young man, and many a time he had been sent into such impassioned paroxysms by the dazzling conversations on art in the Pre-Raphaelite salons, or by the mental strain of composing his own verse and tragedies, overflowing with wonderful poetic bombast, that he could no longer control his own voice and limbs. After these quasi-epileptic fits he often lay prostrate for weeks, and soon, unfitted for general society, he could only bear the company of those who were close to him. Initially he spent the periods of convalescence at the family country estate, but later, ever more frequently, he went to the coast with the trusty Watts-Dunton. Rambles from Southwold to Dunwich, through the windblown fields of sedge, worked like a sedative upon him. A long poem entitled By the North Sea was his tribute to the gradual dissolution of life. Like ashes the low cliffs crumble and the banks down into dust. I remember reading in a study of Swinburne that, one summer evening, when he was visiting the churchyard of All Saints with Watts-Dunton, he thought he saw a greenish glow far out on the surface of the sea. The glow, he is reported as saying, reminded him of the palace of Kublai Khan, which was built on the site later occupied by Peking at the very time when Dunwich was one of the most important communities in the kingdom of England. If I remember rightly, that same study told how Swinburne described every last detail of the fabled palace to Watts-Dunton that evening: the snow-white wall more than four miles in length, the arsenals crammed with bridles, saddles and armour of every sort, the storehouses and treasuries, the stables where row upon row of the finest horses stood, the banqueting halls that could accommodate more than six thousand, the private apartments, the zoo with its unicorn enclosure, and the hill, three hundred feet high, that the Khan had caused to be raised on the north side, in order to command an unrestricted view. Within the space of a year, Swinburne reputedly said, this new landmark, the slopes of which were strewn with green lapis lazuli, was planted with the rarest and most majestic of mature evergreen trees, which had been dug up complete with roots and earth from where they originally grew and transported, often over considerable distances, by specially trained teams of elephants. Never before, Swinburne is said to have claimed that evening in Dunwich, nor ever since, had anything more beautiful been created on earth than that artificial hill, which was green even in midwinter and crowned by a palace of peace, in a similar hue of green. Algernon Charles Swinburne, whose life was coterminous to the year with that of the Dowager Empress Tz'u-hsi, was born on the 5th of April 1837, the eldest of the six children of Admiral Charles Henry Swinburne and his wife, Lady Jane Henrietta, daughter of the third Earl of Ashburnham. Both families traced their ancestry to that remote time when Kublai Khan was building his palace and Dunwich was trading with every nation that could then be reached by sea. As long as anyone could remember, the Swinburnes and the Ashburnhams had been members of the royal entourage, prominent commanders and warriors, lords of vast estates, and explorers. Curious to relate, one General Robert Swinburne, great uncle to Algernon Swinburne, became a subject of His Apostolic Majesty and was invested a Baron of the Holy Roman Empire, presumably on the strength of his pronounced ultramontane leanings. When he died he was governor of Milan, and his son, until his death in 1907 at the age of eighty-seven, held the office of chamberlain to Kaiser Franz Josef. This extreme manifestation of political Catholicism in one branch of the family may conceivably have been a first sign of decadence. That aside, however, the question remains of how a family so adept at life should have produced a scion forever on the verge of a nervous breakdown, a paradox which long puzzled Swinburne's biographers as they eagerly teased at his family descent and hereditary make-up, till at length they agreed to describe the poet of Atalanta in Calydon as an epigenetic phenomenon sprung from the void, as it were, from beyond all natural possibility. It is certain that Swinburne, by reason of his physical appearance alone, must have seemed a complete aberration.

He was small of stature, and at every point in his development he had remained far behind a normal size; he was quite startlingly fine-limbed; yet even as a boy he had an extraordinarily large, indeed outsize, head on his shoulders, which sloped weakly away from his neck. That truly unusual head, which was made the more striking by his bushy, fiery-red shock of hair and his piercing watery-green eyes, made Swinburne, as one of his contemporaries noted, an object of amazement at Eton. On the day that he started school — it was the summer of 1849, and Swinburne had just turned twelve — his was the largest hat in all Eton. A certain Lindo Myers, together with whom Swinburne later crossed the Channel from Le Havre in the autumn of 1868, on which occasion a gust of wind blew the hat off Swinburne's head and swept it overboard, writes that after they docked in Southampton it was not until the third purveyor of hats that they found headgear to fit Swinburne, and even then, Myers adds, the leather band and the lining had to be removed. Despite his extremely ill-proportioned physique, Swinburne dreamt from early youth, and particularly after reading newspaper accounts of the charge at Balaclava, of joining a cavalry regiment and losing his life as a beau sabreur in some equally senseless battle. Even when he was a student at Oxford, this vision outshone any other conception he might have of his own future; and only when all hope of dying a hero's death was gone, thanks to his underdeveloped body, did he devote himself unreservedly to literature and thus, perhaps, to a no less radical form of self-destruction. Possibly Swinburne would not have survived the nervous crises which became more serious as time went on, had he not increasingly submitted to the regime of his lifetime companion, Watts-Dunton. Watts-Dunton was soon attending to the entire correspondence, dealing with all the little matters that were continuously putting Swinburne into the utmost panic, and thus made it possible for the poet to eke out almost three more decades of pallid afterlife. In 1879, more dead than alive following a nervous attack, Swinburne was taken in a four-wheeler to Putney Hill in south-west London, and there, at number 2, The Pines, a modest suburban town house, the two

bachelors lived henceforth, carefully avoiding the least excitement. Their days invariably followed a routine devised by Watts-Dunton. Swinburne, Watts-Dunton reportedly said with a certain pride in the tried and tested correctness of his system, always walks in the morning, writes in the afternoon and reads in the evening. And, what is more, at meal times he eats like a caterpillar and at night he sleeps like a dormouse. Now and then a guest who wished to see the prodigious poet in his suburban exile was invited to lunch. The three would then sit at the table in the gloomy dining room, Watts-Dunton, who was hard of hearing, making conversation in booming tones while Swinburne, like a well-brought-up child, kept his head bowed over his plate, devouring an enormous helping of beef in silence. One of the visitors to Putney at the turn of the century wrote that the two old gentlemen put him in mind of strange insects in a Leiden jar. Time and again, looking at Swinburne, this visitor continued, he was reminded of the ashy grey silkworm, Bombyx mori, be it because of how he munched his way through his food bit by bit or be it because, out of the snooze he had slipped into after lunch, he abruptly awoke to new life, convulsed with electric energy, and, flapping his hands flitted about his library, like a startled moth, clambering up and down the stands and ladders to fetch the one or other treasure from the shelves. The enthusiasm which seized him as he was thus engaged found expression in rhapsodic declamations about his favourite poets Marlowe, Landor and Hugo, but also in not infrequent reminiscences of his childhood on the Isle of Wight and in Northumberland. In one such moment, in utter rapture, he apparently recalled sitting at his old Aunt Ashburnham's feet as a boy, listening to her account of the first grand ball she went to as a girl, accompanied by her mother. After the ball they drove many miles homeward on a crisp, cold, snow-bright winter night, when suddenly the carriage stopped by a group of dark figures who, it transpired, were burying a suicide at a crossroads. In writing down this memory that goes back a century and a half into the past, noted the visitor, himself long since deceased, he beheld perfectly clearly the dreadful Hogarthian nocturne as Swinburne painted it, and the little boy too, with his big head and fiery hair standing on end, wringing his hands and beseeching: Tell me more, Aunt Ahshburnham, please tell me more.