Free Anatomy of Restlessness by Bruce Chatwin Page A

white faience tiles. The floor was a parquet of scrubbed pine. The rug was Tibetan and blue.
    At the eastern end of the room there was a screen covered with the palest orange Hawaiian tapa-cloth and, behind it, Marshal Ney’s steel campaign bed with its original lime green taffeta hangings.
    On the back of the screen hung the few watercolours and drawings, salvaged from a far larger collection and which Mr Tod did not now absolutely loathe. Among them were: The Horsehair Standards of Suleiman the Magnificent, by the German draughtsman Melchior Lorch; The Mechanics of an Eagle’s Wing , by Jacopo Ligozzi; a miniature of an Arctic Tern done by Mansur for the Emperor Jahangîr; a few brushstrokes of the quarry at Bibémus; an ice-floe by Caspar David Friedrich; Delacroix’s own rumpled bed-sheets, and one of Turner’s ‘colour beginnings’ – two crimson clouds in a golden sky.
    Apart from a steel chaise de camp and Baron Vivant-Denon’s travelling desk, the furniture of the room was of no consequence. Mr Tod said he had no time for furniture that would not fit on the pannier of a mule.
    There were, however, two wing chairs with decisively cut linen covers. And on three grey tempera tables were arranged the collection of curiosities that Mr Tod, by a process of elimination and the exigencies of travel, had reduced to the bleak essentials.
    In none of the works of art was the human image to be found.
    Inventories make tiresome reading, so I shall confine the list to a Shang bronze fang-i with the ‘melon-skin’ patina; a Nuremberg sorcerer’s mirror; an Aztec plate with a purple bloom; the crystal reliquary of a Gandharan stupa; a gold mounted bezoar; a jade flute; a wampum belt; a pink granite Horus falcon of Dynasty I and some Eskimo morse ivory animals which, for all the stylised attenuation of their features, seemed positively to breathe. I must, however, single out three cutting implements since they were the subject of Maximilan Tod’s essay Die Ästhetik der Messerschärfe , published in Jena in 1941, in which he claimed that all weapons are artificial claws or canines and give their users the satisfaction known to carnivores as they rend warm flesh.
    These were:
    1. An Acheulian flint hand-axe from the Seine Gravels with the added attraction of Louis Quinze ormolu mounts and the dedication, ‘Pour le Roi’.
    2. A German Bronze-Age dagger excavated by Mr Tod’s father from a tumulus at Ueckermünde on the Baltic.
    3. A sword blade from the collection of his friend and teacher, Ernst Gruenwald, dated 1279 and signed by Toshiru Yoshimitsu, the greatest swordsmith of Mediaeval Japan. (A mark on the blade signified that it had successfully performed, on a criminal, the movement known as iai , an upward thrust that severs the body clean from the right hip to the left shoulder.)
    Nor shall I omit a description of three other items from the Gruenwald Collection: a tea bowl by Koetsu called ‘Mountains in Winter’, a box of woven birchbark from the Gold Tribe of Manchuria, and a block of blue-black stone with green markings and the inscription: ‘ This inkstone with Dead Eyes comes from the Old Pit of the Lower Cliff at Tuan Hsi and was the property of the painter Mi Fei .’
    In the bark box Mr Tod kept his two most treasured possessions: a calligraphy by the Zen Master, Sen Sotan, with the tenet: ‘Man originally possesses nothing’, and a landscape scroll by Mi Fei himself—painter of cloud-like mountains and mountain-like clouds, drunk, petromaniac, connoisseur of inkstones, hater of domesticated animals, who roamed about the mountains with his priceless art collection always beside him.
    The walls of the room were bare but for a framed Turkish calligraphy, written on a gilded skeleton leaf with a line from Rûmi (Mathnâvi VI, 723): ‘To be a dead man walking, one who has died before his death.’
    Mr Tod’s