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the Fire Mountain theme through a glandular lens to “see” the mountain's sub-thematic heat 21 . This
“sweating-as-seeing” makes the heat of Fire Mountain visceral, something felt by the skin like the
“scorching” feature of the “winds” but compounded by a sudoriferous response:
我 来 严 冬 时
山 下 多 炎 风
人 马 尽 汗 流
熟 知 造 化 功
I arrived when the year was at its coldest,
Below the mountain many scorching winds.
Men and horses drenched in flowing sweat,
Who knows the works of Nature's invention?
(“Passing Fire Mountain”, lines 7-10)
九 月 尚 流 汗
炎 风 吹 沙 埃
In the ninth month and still sweating,
Scorching winds blow sand and dust.
(“Mission to Jiaohe”, lines 5-6)
In “Passing Fire Mountain”, the poet-narrator selects the feature of men and horses sweating (ren ma
jin liuhan 人 马 尽 流 汗 ) near Fire Mountain and utilizes their dermal glands to focalize the heat of Fire
Mountain, that is focalizing the thermal landscape through an act of perspiration or a “glandular” lens. 22
Likewise, the poet-narrator of “Mission to Jiaohe”, without resorting to adjectives that simply describe
temperature, uses this glandular lens to “see” and express the severe force of Fire Mountain's
thermality.
The inclusion of temporal dimensions also works to accentuate the ferocity of the searing heat.
Reflecting a custom in frontier poetry in which depictions of the landscape are typically positioned
seasonally in the autumnal eighth and ninth months, 23 the poet-narrator of “Mission to Jiaohe” seems to
express of feeling of disequilibrium through the adverb “still” (shang 尚 ), that somehow his
21 The heat that is glandularly “seen” by the poet-narrators is an ordinary heat, a heat detectable by the body's senses, ie its
sweat glands through the act of sweating. Fire Mountain and Hot Lake also produce a supersensory heat which the poetnarrators
focalize in the imaginary mode of focalization. This sub-theme of the landscape will be discussed later in this
section.
22 Or as noted before “sweating-as-seeing”, seeing here meaning an act of focalization not necessarily dependent on the
optic nerve.
23 Marie Chan, “The Frontier Poems of Ts'en Shen”, p. 429.