Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War by Pearl S. Buck Read Free Book Online Page B

under their land, and upon this possession Ling Tan used often to ponder. What, he would ask himself in the long pleasant days of lonely plowing, or longer tilling against weeds among the young crops, what lay beneath this soft black skin of the earth in which were held the roots of his seedlings?
    He had once in his youth dug a well for his father and for the first time he had seen what lay under their fields. First there was the deep thick crust of the earth, fertile and loose with the tilling of his forefathers and with their waste which they poured back into it year after year. This earth was so rich that almost it was quick enough to spring into life of its own accord. Fed for growing and nurtured for harvest, it lay hungry for seed as a woman is, eager to be about its business.
    This earth he knew. But under it was a hard yellow bottom of clay, as tightly packed as the bottom of a pan. How did that yellow bottom come there? He did not know nor did his father, but there it lay to catch and hold the rain for the roots that needed it. And beneath that yellow clay was a bed of rock, not solid, but splintered and split into thin pieces, and between these was grayish sand. And under this bed was still another, strangest of all, for here were pieces of tile and scraps of blue pottery and when Ling Tan dug the well, he even found an old silver coin of a sort he had never seen before and then a broken white pottery bowl and at last a deep brown jar, glazed and whole and full of a gray dust. He had taken these things to his father, and father and son they had looked at them.
    “These were used by those from whom we sprang,” his father had said. “Let us put them into the tombs with your grandparents.” So they had done, and then Ling Tan went on digging and out of those depths clear water spouted forth one morning like a fountain, and never to this day had the well failed.
    Yet beneath that river, he used often to muse, this earth of his went on. Others had owned it and lived on it and had become part of it themselves, for it was a common saying of the old men in the village that if a man could dig deeply enough in his own land or any land, he would find, five times over, the roots and ruins of what had once been great cities and palaces and temples. Ling Tan’s own father’s father in his time had once dug deep for a grave for his father, and had found a small dragon, made of gold, such as might have fallen from the roof of an emperor’s palace, and he had sold it for enough to buy himself a little concubine he craved. Ill luck it was, too, so the story had come down from generation to generation, for that woman was evil and robbed his house of peace and goods and he was helpless whatever she did because he loved her and through this love they all but lost the very land they had, and would have lost it if his old wife, seeing what havoc was about to fall upon them, had not given the concubine timely poison. Even then it was evil enough, for the man, when his concubine was dead, killed himself, but at least the land was still his sons’ possession. But after that it was always told that the concubine was somehow faery and that the dragon was no true dragon but a fox spirit that had entered into the body of the pretty girl the man loved too well.
    Whether all this was true or not, there the land was, and it went deep down beyond fountain and river and rock and as long as he lived it belonged to Ling Tan as far as it went down and to his sons after him.
    The whole earth, he had heard, was round. This at least a young man had told who came preaching of many curious things to the village one summer’s day. He came, he said, to help the common people and to do them a good deed by what he called teaching, and because the people in the Ling village were courteous and kind they were willing to listen, especially as it was a feast season and they were not working. So they listened to tales of the roundness of the earth and to the