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