View/Open - University of Victoria
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144<br />
their allusive manner in focalizing supra-sensory heat and their responses to these revelations,<br />
intertextual commonalities continue to reverberate among the poems in how the existents <strong>of</strong> the hot<br />
landscape reveal their thermal ferocity by assaulting the frontier setting itself . At its most passive, this<br />
presentation <strong>of</strong> thermal existents as violent phenomena is manifested in the pervasive fear that birds<br />
have <strong>of</strong> encountering the landscape's heat:<br />
火 山 突 兀 赤 亭 口<br />
火 山 五 月 火 云 厚<br />
火 云 满 山 凝 未 开<br />
飞 鸟 千 里 不 敢 来<br />
Fire Mountain towers over the entrance to Chiting,<br />
Fire Mountain in the fifth month, fire clouds are thick.<br />
Fire clouds fill the mountains, dense they do not break;<br />
Flying birds <strong>of</strong> a thousand li away do not dare come by.<br />
(“Song <strong>of</strong> Fire Mountain Clouds”, lines 1-4)<br />
侧 闻 阴 山 胡 儿 语<br />
西 头 热 海 水 如 煮<br />
海 上 众 鸟 不 敢 飞<br />
中 有 鲤 鱼 长 且 肥<br />
I overheard the Hu people <strong>of</strong> Yin mountain say<br />
that at the end <strong>of</strong> the Western frontier lies Hot Lake;<br />
its waters seems to boil.<br />
Flocks <strong>of</strong> birds do not dare fly above the lake;<br />
In the lake carp are long and fat.<br />
(“Song <strong>of</strong> Hot Lake”, lines 1-4)<br />
From its second line, the heat <strong>of</strong> Fire Mountain in“Song <strong>of</strong> Fire Mountain Clouds” transfers the entirety<br />
<strong>of</strong> its thermality into the surrounding clouds. This allocation <strong>of</strong> heat is immense: in the first four lines<br />
“fire” (huo 火 ) appears four times, a repetition which guarantees that the clouds <strong>of</strong> Fire Mountain never<br />
drain themselves <strong>of</strong> their thermal reserves. The bubbling waters <strong>of</strong> Hot Lake also display little<br />
likelihood <strong>of</strong> exhausting their heat source, a sultriness which like the clouds <strong>of</strong> Fire Mountain is<br />
revealed indirectly by two instances <strong>of</strong> avian apprehension. Confronted with the prospect <strong>of</strong> traversing<br />
a frontier ruled by fiery clouds in one poem and an unnaturally ebullient lake in another, birds choose<br />
to “not dare” (bu gan 不 敢 ) the feverish elements and instead commit themselves to avoiding such<br />
places. 33<br />
33 The four lines <strong>of</strong> frontier landscape description in Cen Shen's twenty-six line “Sending Off Qi Le on His Return to<br />
Hedong” (“Song Qi Le gui Hedong” 送 祁 乐 归 河 东 ) also make use <strong>of</strong> birds that are reluctant to fly as a vehicle for