Free Segaki by David Stacton Page B

something living, for in this charred landscape the only living thing he saw was a tiny sapper with three pale green leaves, quavering at the foot of a smouldering oak, as a reminder that all is not death, either. For some reason this made him feel less feverish and more rational. After all, above the smoke the sun was warm. He hurried on.
    By noon he had reached the other end of the valley. Here a series of folded geological faults provided a group of isolated hills, extremely picturesque, with carefully plotted woods, and some flowing water. He began to climb. Above them there was another meadow, and on knolls scattered about it lay the older and nobler houses of the district. Here, too, was the great waterfall, which for the moment he could neither see nor hear, though as he walked along, a distant incessant pouring reached his ears.
    The houses, when visible, were shut up and empty,their caretakers invisible, their owners having prudently removed themselves from so near the fighting. But his brother, he knew, would not have removed, for he loved this place. He had once sent Muchaku a scroll of his house and grounds. They must be somewhere ahead, up, well concealed, to the right of the fall.
    The air at this height had an enhanced sanity that to others would have produced a madness. But to Muchaku it was almost to reinhabit the serene heights of Noto again. He and his brother, they had always been a family for heights, if only because they had had to hide among them as children, in order to avoid the general massacre of the family heirs, when their fathers had lost the strength to control the favours of the world.
    Of course we may perceive truth anywhere, but it is perhaps only on alpine levels that we gain the ability to move freely through it. The sages are always in the mountains. Otherwise they are no more than wise men, and of course a sage does not have to be wise. He has seen through all that. He would rather peel potatoes.
    The perfection here was not so cautious as at Noto, nor so walled in. It was carelessly scattered about, wherever it happened to concrete. Muchaku went forward almost eagerly, and climbing an eventual spur, saw well hidden in a small bowl of rock, amid carefully untrained trees, his brother’s house.
    He recognized it at once. It had the sparse, unfurnished, austere lines of that kind of luxurious and elegant bleakness that leaves us with only one place to sit in any room. To move anything in these rooms would have been a moral impossibility, as a rare thin jade cup is always safe, because everyone finds it morally impossible to drop it.Even the stream that gurgled through the garden would wisely leave the stones where they were, for they could not be arranged any better, since perfection in art or nature is an arrangement to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken away, without changing its nature. If a rock should shift in that bed, then everything in the house would be rearranged too. It was not the pattern that was fixed, but only the existence of one, for his brother was a very great painter indeed. It took him five years of concentration to do a lightning sketch, but those five years might take only a moment, since concentration has no time. He had always been like that.
    Muchaku felt suddenly timid, for he had not seen his brother for twenty years, and he was coming to ask for something, though he did not know for what. It was just as well. His brother even as a child had given freely only when he was unobserved and unasked.
    The dog however seemed right at home. It trotted in through the garden gate, and there was nothing for Muchaku to do but follow.
    The garden was touching. Obviously it looked the same in peace or war, and could be destroyed by the latter, but not in the least altered by it. It was imperturbable, a sage grey portrait of its owner, with something leaping and young too, here and there among the late irises. And the stream was thoughtfully