HOL

It was still hot, and the late sun's rays fell obliquely across the balcony, through the half-opened shutter, in a shaft of copper-gold. Motionless, the shadows of thin leaves traces a pattern across it as delicate and precise as a Chinese painting on silk. The image of the tree, brushed in like that by the sun, had a grace that the tree itself gave no hint of, for it was merely one of the nameless spindly affairs, parched and dust-laden, that struggled up toward the sky from their pots in the hotel court below. But its shadow might have been designed by Ma Yüan.