Page:Ernest Bramah - Kai Lungs Golden Hours.djvu/65



When Sun Wei definitely understood that the deities were against him (for on every occasion his enemies prospered and the voice of his own authority grew less), he looked this way and that with a well-considering mind.

He did nothing hastily, but when once a decision was reached it was as unbending as iron and as smoothly finished as polished jade. At about the evening hour when others were preparing to offer sacrifice he took the images and the altars of his Rites down from their honourable positions and cast them into a heap on a waste expanse beyond his courtyard. Then with an axe he unceremoniously detached their incomparable limbs from their sublime bodies and flung the parts into a fire that he had prepared. "It is better," declared Sun Wei, standing beside the pile, his hands buried within his sleeves—"it is better to be struck down at once, rather than to wither away slowly like a half-uprooted cassia-tree." When this act of defiance was reported in the Upper World the air grew thick with the cries and indignation of the lesser deities, and the sound of their passage as they projected themselves across vast regions of space and into the presence of the supreme N'guk was like the continuous rending of innumerable pieces of the finest silk.

In his musk-scented heaven, however, N'guk slept, as his habit was at the close of each celestial day. It