A courtier speaks to Ch'in Shih-huang-ti, ca. 210 B.C.
Highness, the former walls were helpless. Theystood alone in the middle of small fieldsprotecting nothing. A single peasant's holdingengulfed each one as it ran briefly, straightfrom noplace off to noplace, with ruinous stepsof broken stone at both ends. Only head-high,without the towers, gates and towns of your great wall,they stuck where they were, never rising over hillsor curving through valleys: nothing but shoddy masonryand a mystery: who built them, how long ago,what for? They seemed to have no role but balkingthe reaper and the ox; their bases madeislands in the flashing scythe-strokes, where wild flowersand shrubs sprouted.
So all the people praise youfor burying such walls and their memoryin your vast one, which joins them, stretching farbeyond where they once crumbled to hold your Empire:a wall which therefore can never have an endbut has to go on extending itself forever.How useful, how cogent your wall is: a palefor the civilized, a dike against the wild peopleoutside, who trade their quiet human bloodfor the rage of gods, tearing men to pieces,throwing them, watching them fall. In buryingthose little walls, Lord, you have covered our shameat our ancestors, best forgotten, whose mighty workswere so pointless, or so pitiably useless.Was all their effort so that daisies could grow in fissures?So that some human work would rise over the flatsand weather till it seemed not human? Onlyso that something of ours could be like trees and rocks:docile-seeming, yet sullenly opposedto use, and when compelled, only half serving,reserving from the functions that we give thema secret and idle self. The peasants would makelean-tos for cattle against those walls: they servedfor this alone.
Now scholars, Lord, are sayingthe gods are not bulls and cows. That in ancient timeswe herded these animals to keep from starvingand going naked, and so came the old customof thinking them gods -- from dependence. In my youth,I know, the peasants said just the opposite.Worship came first. The awesome bull and cowwere gathered to be adored more easily,till people noticed how they let themselvesbe driven and penned. Next came the first murdersagainst these gods, and the careful observationthat they stood to be killed. And so their cult becamecontempt of beings that would live with usand submit to our crimes and hunger, and we beganto breed them. That is why, the farmer says,cattle are honoured, murdered, eaten, cherishedwith labour that makes him their slave, and that is whyin summer he exults in blood, but shivers with fear,with exhausted terror and regret, and sinks intostunned revelry all winter, eating the salted meat,getting children, his house closed up with snow,himself awake as if he slept, livingas if he had already died, and rich, happyas if he were a buried worm.
Is God,then, Highness, the fat flaccidity of cattle?Myself, I don't like to wonder anymore.I only hope lifelong service earns what I ask:the command of some far bastion on your wallwhere it curves out into the unsettled wastesbeyond any field, and the barrenness insideis indistinguishable from that without.This is the reward and end of life I want:to be a point, though infinitely smalland far from you, in that wide circle centredon your great self. I see myself arrivingto take charge of my troops. I look down from the tower:bare plains, outcrops of ice and rock, vast restlessstirrings of grey grasses and dark-veined overcast,the cold wind's hissing. Year after year the same,waiting for an assault that never comes,straining to glimpse our naked enemiescreeping blended with their stony soil: nothingbut legend, it may be. Maybe a morningwill rise when, waking, I find that I've forgottenwhich way is north, and can't tell if I am turnedoutward to danger or inward, Highness, to you.The sun invisible, a murky light diffusedthroughout featureless cloud, and the wall so longno curve appears -- it seems to stretch out straightendlessly east and west: what clue will there bewhich way to face my people for the attack?It will be crucial then to show no doubt.My orders, I vow, though ignorant, will be crisp.
