Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 2 (1925-08).djvu/76



HE gray, gloomy shop of Yin Wen, the lantern-maker, lay up one of the narrow filthy alleys of Canton as though it were a bit of refuse swept from one of the main highways by some monstrous boom. It was a mere shell of a shop, completely open in the front, and so many cracks did it have between its paperlike board walls it was practically open in the sides as well.

As shops are reckoned, it was of little account, until one gazed on the countless lanterns stacked about on every side and hanging from the dust-festooned rafters overhead. Here were lanterns of splendor, lanterns for every country and every clime, for pauper and for prince; lanterns of magic, of wonder and of awe. Yet more interesting than any of the gaudy lanterns was Yin Wen himself, creator of vast beauty even though he was as ugly as a toad. Ugliness in a broader sense is merely a comparative term. Even a toad becomes attractive when compared to a slimy octopus or watersnake, or some soft-creeping, death-cold night terror that haunts our dreams.

Yin Wen looked old enough to have been the first historian of all China. He suggested a mummy suddenly endowed with life. He was very short, his feet were very large and his toes turned out. He walked in a toadlike manner, almost by leaps, and his eyes bulged watery and staring from their sockets. The skin on his face was like shriveled brown parchment. His eyebrows were gone; gone also was his hair, leaving his bronzed pate polished like glass, a shininess unrelieved except by a great purple-red mole in the direct center.

When his face was in repose he looked like one of the idol monstrosities which dot China as thickly as beggars. Always as Yin Wen worked, he kept muttering to himself bits of verse from ancient China legends and forgotten songs.

One morning as I loitered near his shop, I heard him crooning a song written more than two hundred years ago by the immortal Yuan Mei.

There was enchantment in the verses and I could not help but comment on it.

"One would imagine," said I, "to hear you sing, that there was witchery in lanterns."

At my words, he dropped his tools. He came toward me, his face convulsed with emotion. "And is there not?" he demanded tensely. "You wise men of the West gloat in your imagined knowledge, but some of the greatest facts of earth are still closed books to you. A lantern is as 219