on the millstone, speaking to each other sometimes loudly, sometimes in hushed tones. As the millstone circled around, they emptied baskets of raw materials into it, bark from some sort of local tree, white on the inside. With its repeated turning, the millstone ground the bark, compressing it until immaculately white raw sap spilled from it. This was then mixed with water to form “Pagan paper pulp,” which, I was told, repelled insects.
I crouched down and, with the tip of my finger, touched the warm, viscous fluid whose smell reminded me of Chinese medicines. Just as that thought came to me, I shuddered, thinking I could see him in the white fog. It’s him, I thought, it’s Tumchooq, right here, on the other side of the mill, the same stature, the same way of leaning towards a basin of water as I saw him bend over baskets of aubergines so many times. I came very close to calling out his name, at the risk of giving everyone doubts about my mental health. The illusion dissipated as I drew closer, but I was still disturbed by the resemblance between Tumchooq and that monk who stood stripped to the waist plunging a big wooden sieve loaded with wet paper pulp into a basin and, when the water was up to his elbows, freezing in that position with such concentration that the gesture, which lasted only a fraction of a second, seemed to go on for an eternity. He shook the sieve in the water, so gently the movement was almost imperceptible, then lifted it straight back out again: the shapeless lump of pulp had transformed itself into a sheet of virgin paper, as if he had wrested it from the depths of the void. All that remained was to dry the sheet outside. But when he looked up and recognised me his smile gave way to embarrassment mingled with a hint of fear.
In the xylography workshop, on the other hand, complete silence reigned. From a distance I thought I saw little points of light gleaming like minute yellow halos over the heads of saints in religious frescoes, but as I came nearer I realised they were the shaven heads of twenty or so monks sitting side by side in a huge room, busy engraving wooden plates for printing sacred texts. Most of them had a magnifying glass clamped over their right eye, some over their left eye, and each of them worked under a lamp whose beam lit a specific area. I had to strain my ears to hear the wood creak under their engravers’ styles, sometimes a slight crack followed by a sigh. Perhaps because of their watchmakers glasses, I felt as if I were surrounded by the assorted ticking of clocks, alarm clocks, watches, every sort of timepiece of which xylography itself is a perfect example.
First a sheet of paper bearing the text in manuscript is placed facedown on a wooden plate about the size of a book and stuck onto it until the ink seeps into it, leaving a clear imprint of the writing; then the paper is removed and the wooden plate (preferably made of a hardwood) is pared away little by little, millimetre by millimetre, until only the letters are left in relief. The chiselling work, line-engraving the letters, was so subtle that my eyes eventually clouded over while I watched, as if staring at an ant eating a grain of rice. Engraving just one letter took ten or twenty minutes, I could barely make out the progress of a single upstroke. I later learned that engravers can work only two lines of text a day, that it often takes them a good ten days to finish a page—a wooden plate—in Pali text of the teachings preached by Buddha two thousand five hundred years earlier; and just one seconds distraction, the slightest carelessness, can mean they have to start all over again.
The sound of chisels, the fragmented light, the watchmaker’s glasses behind which their eyes were hidden, probably fixed, motionless, slightly protruding and perhaps very beautiful, a little cough, an engraver’s right hand sculpting the wood, a panoply of chisels in different sizes clamped in his left hand, mouths blowing softly over the plates raising a fine wood dust changed into powdered gold by the lamplight—it all constituted a separate world.
Several monks were repairing old plates, some as much as a hundred and fifty years old with areas that needed reworking with a jigsaw, because the letters