James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

33.Climbing Pukshan

For some twenty months in 1946-48 I was a language officer (first lieutenant) in the G2, "Intelligence" office of 24^th Corps in Seoul. In our office in the Hangook Hotel (or was it Banto Hotel?), six of us sat every day with some dozen enlisted men who were mostly Nisei Japanese speakers (a few Korean) and maybe fifteen Korean translators. The real intelligence office downstairs would mark articles in the local newspapers that they wanted translated; the Korean translators would do this, the enlisted men (badly chosen for this job, since they were mostly not very literate themselves) would proofread the translations and pass them on to us; we would again proofread them and pass them to typists. A large, unwieldy operation performed by semi-competent people—brought together from small interpreting units, each one officer and two or three enlisted men, that had interrogated Japanese prisoners in the Pacific war. (Army reasoning: language units are language units. Different language? who cares.) So I had lots of free time; spent much of it practicing the piano (getting to be fairly competent, for the only time in my life—I took lessons from a Korean woman whose younger sister was my girlfriend. )

Among my friends there was a civilian employee, a young poet named Ellis Settle. He and I began to spend a lot of time together, talking about literature and music, writing verses and cryptic communications to each other, roaming the city. I had earlier, led by friends who knew the way, climbed Pukshan, the mountain that towered north of the city. It was some distance from the city, a walk through the countryside, and a climb following a path up the rocky mountainside, to a large flat area, a ledge before a cave, on which was a Buddhist monastery. The monks welcomed us, served us tea. We didn't continue to the top that time, but learned it was an easy climb from there.

I had told Ellis about this, and we planned to make the climb together, but somehow put it off. The time came when he was scheduled to return home, and we still hadn't done it. The night before his departure, we were drinking whiskey (cheap at the PX) in my room in the hotel, getting quite drunk and complaining in a maudlin way that we had failed to have this experience together. Around 10 PM? we arrived at a great resolve: we would make the climb anyway. That it was a winter night in December (if my memory is right), with snow on the ground, made no difference. We put on warm coats and boots, took more whiskey, and set off through the city and to the foot of the mountain and began the climb. We had flashlights, but stumbled around—I remember my foot going through the ice of a stream—at last, miraculously, reaching the ledge and the wall shutting off the monastery, where we began beating on the gate. It was after midnight, and it took some time to rouse the monks and explain who we were (I spoke good Japanese, as they did) and what we wanted: a place to sleep so that we could rise before dawn and climb to the top to watch the sunrise. They took us in, gave us something warm to eat and drink (my memory is unclear) and put us in a room with a bare floor and blankets. We slept, to be roused before dawn by the monks, given tea? to drink, and sent off to finish the climb. We did reach the top and watched the sunrise. My memory is that it was a sublime moment, but that may be only in retrospect. Then down and back to Seoul, where Ellis was barely able to organize himself for his departure.

Years later, a Berkeley grad student in Korean studies, when we talked about Seoul and its environs, told me how he had climbed that mountain and talked with the monks, and heard from them this mysterious story, which had taken on the character of a legend, about two foreigners who had appeared in the middle of a snowy night and beat on their gate--

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