In the fifth year of the Yongping era of Emperor Ming of Han, two men of Shan county named Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao went into Mount Tiantai to gather bark for paper, and lost the path.
For thirteen days they wandered. Their food ran out. They were at the point of dying when they saw, far off on a slope, a peach tree heavy with fruit — and below it a ravine and a face of rock that no one could climb. They went up by the vines. There were peaches. They ate several, and the hunger stopped and their bodies came back.
Coming down, they cupped water from the stream, and floating in it were turnip leaves, perfectly fresh. Then a second cup came past with grains of sesame-rice in it.
“There are people up this water,” said Liu Chen. “Not far.”
They waded up the stream against the current for two or three li, crossed the shoulder of the mountain, and came out into a great valley with a broad river running through it. And on the bank of the river stood two women.
They were lovely past describing. And when the women saw the two men standing there with the cups in their hands, they laughed and said: “Liu and Ruan — so you’ve brought back the cups you lost.”
As though they had been expected.
The women took them home — a house of tiles and painted beams, with curtains, and serving-girls, and food such as the men had never imagined: hemp-seed rice, goat’s meat, hyssop cakes, and wine. And in the evening, without any ceremony at all, each woman took one of them to wife.
It was, the men thought, perhaps half a year.
Then, one day, Liu Chen said that he wanted to go home. The women did not argue. They called the serving-girls, and there was a feast, and music, and the two of them were sent down the mountain to the place where the paths meet.
They walked out of Tiantai and came to their village.
The village was not their village. The houses were wrong; the fields were wrong; not one face was a face they knew. They asked after their own families. A very old man, leaning on a stick, took a long time to understand them.
“Liu Chen?” he said at last. “Ruan Zhao? My grandfather’s grandfather told me about them. They went into the mountain to gather bark and never came back. That was seven generations ago.”
They stood in the road of a village where their own houses had been, and the road was not theirs. And they turned and went back into the mountain, and no one ever saw them again.
The tale is short and does not explain itself, which is why it has never stopped being retold. Two men went up a stream because they were hungry. Half a year passed. Seven generations passed. And the last line is the one that makes it unbearable — not that they lost their homes, but that they had been home, and had asked to leave, and had been let go without a word of warning, because that is what immortals do: they let you go, and they let you find out.