Kasyapa presides over the funeral ceremony and the pyre catches light of its own accord. Every time I think of those scenes carved in lacquer, another funeral scene comes to mind: yours, beside the River Lu, whose murmurings still reverberate in my ears; a misty, almost insubstantial image, except for your feet, which I touched with my forehead and kissed, as a reflex action, not because I knew the Buddhist tradition. I seem to think they were still warm.
CONTINUATION OF MARCO POLO’S BOOK: In this city there is a noble thing I shall describe to you. For in this city there was once a rich and powerful king. When he was about to die, he ordered that on his tomb or, to be precise, on his monument two towers should be built, one in gold, the other in silver, in a way that I shall describe. One of the towers was made of beautiful gems that were then covered in gold, and the gold was at least a fingers thickness, and the tower was so well covered with it that it appeared to be made entirely of gold. It was a good ten paces high and as wide as befitted its height. It was rounded on the outside and all about its curving surface it was covered with small golden bells, which rang every time the wind blew between them. And the other tower I spoke of above, made of silver and in every way like the golden tower, was made of the same materials and to the same height and in the same way And, similarly, the tomb was partly covered with gold leaf and partly with silver leaf. And the king had this built for his grandeur and for his soul. And, I shall tell you this much, to see them was to see the most beautiful towers in the world, of immense value. And when the sun touches them, they are resplendent and can be seen from far, far away.
NOTES MADE BY PAUL D’AMPÈRE: Constructor kings like this run through Pagans history between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, right up to the Mongol invasion. Anawratha, its founder, and the next two generations are reputed to have built Buddhist monuments of titanic proportions, and Pagan still has more than eight hundred of them over a stretch of about four hundred kilometres, not to mention those that have fallen in ruins, making it a gigantic sacred city, which has nothing to envy Angkor in Khmer country The famous Temple of Ananda, to take just one example, is a vertiginously positioned shrine shaped like a long-handled bell, perched on a huge tiered pyramid which looks like a perfectly white hill, a great glittering mass, surrounded by two cloisters and topped with a dazzling, almost frighteningly tall point, rising higher and higher, so far into the sky it disappears in the clouds. This monument borders on the fabulous, but, in the end, my investigations served only to highlight a fundamental and widely known truth, which is that Marco Polo never came to Burma and, therefore, couldn’t know that in a sacred Buddhist city like Pagan there isn’t a single non-religious edifice, far less a royal tomb. Take, for example, what’s known as the Shwedagon Pagoda, commissioned by the first king, Anawratha, in 1509 and completed by his son (or the man recognised as such) King Kyanzittha: it is a vast plinth made up of a succession of platforms, rising in tiers from a square base with inverted corners; mounted on it is a rounded silver tower with, on top of that, another tower, this one in gold and shaped like a bell, with a roof which, it was claimed, was covered with genuine diamonds, and—if the colonial archives are to be believed—these stones ended up in the coffers of the Bank of England. This stupa and not a royal tomb, as the Venetian thought, plays an important role in the country and is to this day the national shrine of Burma, for it was here that a replica of the famous Buddha’s tooth was placed, the tooth preserved at Kandy and sent by the king of Ceylon, Vijayabahu (1059-1114).
NOTES MADE BY TUMCHOOQ: In 1975, the year of the monkey, Pagan was struck by the worst earthquake in its history. The edifices mentioned above, those truly ancient architectural masterpieces bordering on the fabulous, were now a spectacle of total devastation: Shwedagon’s stupa crumbled and still lies by the banks of the Irrawaddy