Hanging Waters by Keith West

ON the ceiling swung slowly the pattern of light which escaped through the triangular holes in the brass cover of the little hanging lamp. This pattern of yellow prints circled about the hook from which the lamp depended by its length of brass chain: the brass oil-container threw a deep cone of shadow below the lamp. In the four corners of the room tiny pin-pricks of red smouldered steadily in the darkness, and four invisible coils of scented smoke rose upwards from the glowing _heung_ which had been lit there. The whole room was filled with the overpowering sweetness of this incense, so that to the man sitting motionless in the cone of blackness it seemed as if the slowly circling pattern of light above him were receding upwards, outwards, to the infinite heavens, leaving him seated at the hub of the world, while about him the stars turned for ever in their slow paths.

Before him lay, open, the _I-Ching_--the Book of Changes--at the seventeenth hexagram, and, although he could not see the book, he was now repeating aloud, like an incantation, the meaning of the sixth line in the hexagram: "The sixth line, undivided, tells us to look at the whole course that is trodden, to examine the presage which that gives. If it be complete and without failure, there will be great good fortune."