The empire of the Khan is truly vast, vast beyond your imagining. Setting out from Khan-balik a man may ride his horse to exhaustion, till the poor beast foams at the mouth and sweats blood; he may then come to a way station and change his horse for a fresh one, and he may do this over and over for a space of days and weeks and months, riding over fertile plains and barren wastes and over snow capped mountains (the highest in the world) and through deserts and villages and great cities and vast forests, sleeping on his horse's back, stopping only to eat or drink or shit or piss. And only after a whole year of this; only when the rider himself is at the point of utter collapse, will he have traversed the Khan's lands from one end to another, from the north of Cathay to the city of Samarkand. And you may be sure that there will be, within this great horse-year of distance, as many things that require the attention of the Khan and the intervention of his officials as there are hairs on the horse, or indeed on all of the horses that the rider has ridden over the course of the year.

So what is the Khan to do? He cannot survey each li of his empire; he cannot meet all of his subjects and listen to all of their complaints; he cannot keep an eye on the movements of each and every one of his countless enemies (and he cannot, as much as he would like to, behead each and every one of them with his own sword); he cannot assess the state of repair of each fortress, irrigation ditch, dam, canal, and road. He cannot have all of the information he needs in order to make decisions, even with all of the spies and informers and officials in the world. And even with all of his counsellors and magicians and priests and wisemen and witches he cannot with certainty foretell how the results of his actions might affect the general well being of the empire. For the empire is like the body of a man or a woman or a horse (only immeasurably more complex); it is a whole that is a multitude, and what effect the manipulation of one part of the multitude may have on the whole no man may predict.

Therefore the Khan keeps a garden, as an empire-in-miniature; a model of his lands, in which he may detect certain correspondences to the ungraspable, ultimately unattainable whole.

In the divination garden of the Khan, there are trees and grass and insects that live off the leaves of the trees and the blades of grass, and other insects that live off the insects that live off the trees and the grass, and birds who eat the insects that live off the insects that live off the grass and the trees and who also eat the fruits of the trees and the seeds of the grass and who also eat the insects that eat the leaves and blades, and other birds who eat the fish and tadpoles and frogs that live in the stream and the small pond, and bigger fish who eat other fish, and small turtles who eat the fish that eat the fish and the fish who get eaten both, and other birds who eat the birds who eat the seeds and who also eat the birds who eat the insects and eat the birds who eat the fish, and deer who like some of the insects eat leaves off trees and blades off grass but who unlike those insects do not get eaten by insects or birds unless you count the ticks who live on their hide, and mice and squirrel and rabbits who eat like the deer except on a much smaller scale, and foxes who eat the mice and squirrel and rabbits, and one tiger who eats everything except for the birds and the insects and the trees and the grass.

And for each blade of the grass and each leaf on the trees and each insect, mouse, squirrel, rabbit, bird, fox, deer, fish, tadpole, frog, and even for the tiger, and perhaps even for every separate section of leaf or feather on wing or scale on fish or hair white dun red orange gray or black, there is a separate name; a word, a number, a memory, a poem, a story, an image, a ritual, a sword, a mirror, a god, a demon, a prophecy, a truth, a lie. And when a poem eats a story or fucks a number or shits a memory; when a lie plucks a truth screaming off a branch and tears it to pieces; why, so newness enters the garden both with death and with young life although strictly of course there is nothing new and also nothing old.