They came back to Chang'an on the wind, and the Tang capital was exactly where they had left it, and that was its own strange grief and joy: fourteen years for the pilgrims, an eternity of fire and ordeal, and the city stood as it had, the same walls, the same river, the same throne, as if no time had passed at all, while the men who walked back into it had been remade entirely.
was waiting. He had never stopped waiting. The book tells the small, devastating detail that carries the whole homecoming: when Tripitaka left, fourteen years before, the emperor had planted a young pine tree in the courtyard of a temple, and had said that he would know his monk was coming home when the branches of the tree turned to point east. And through fourteen years the emperor had watched the tree, whose branches, like all trees, grew toward the light and pointed west, toward the setting sun, toward the direction his monk had walked — and on the morning the pilgrims neared the capital, the branches of the pine turned, overnight, to point east, back toward home, and the emperor knew, and went out to the gate to wait for the brother he had sent to the other side of the world.
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