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230 Continue playing thy great august lute.” Then he slowly drew his august lute to him, and languidly played on it. So almost immediately the sound of the august lute became inaudible. On their forthwith lifting a light and looking, [the Heavenly Sovereign] was dead.

Then, astonished and alarmed, they set him in a mortuary palace, and again taking the country’s great offerings, seeking out all sorts of crimes, such as flaying alive and flaying backwards, breaking down the divisions of rice-fields, filling up ditches, evacuating excrements and urine, marriages between superiors and inferiors, marriages with horses, marriages with cattle, marriages with fowls, and marriages with dogs, and having made a great purification of the land, the Noble Take-uchi again stood in the pure court and requested the Deities’ commands. Thereupon the manner of their instruction and counsel was exactly the same as on the former day: “Altogether this land is a land to be ruled over by the august child in Thine Augustness’s august womb.” Then the Noble Take-uchi said, “[I am filled with] awe, my Great Deities! The august child in this Deity’s womb, what [sort of]