Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 1).djvu/153

 "Down deep under the ground—deep, deep, under all the ground—is a great hole. At night, when he has passed over the world, looked down on everything and finished his work, he, the sun, goes into his hole, and he crawls and creeps along it till he comes to his bed in the middle part of the earth. So then he, the sun, sleeps there in his bed all night.

"This hole is so little, and he, the sun, is so big, that he cannot turn round in it; and so he must, when he has had all his sleep, pass on through, and in the morning we see him come out in the east. When he, the sun, has so come out, he begins to hunt up through the sky to catch and eat any that he can of the stars, his children, for if he does not so catch and eat he cannot live. He, the sun, is not all seen. The shape of him is like a snake or a lizard. It is not his head that we can see, but his belly, filled up with the stars that times and times he has swallowed.

"The moon is the mother of the heavens and is the wife of the sun. She, the moon, goes into the same hole as her husband to sleep her naps. But always she has great fear of the sun, her husband, and when he comes through the hole to the nobee (tent) deep in the ground to sleep, she gets out and comes away if he be cross.

"She, the moon, has great love for her children, the stars, and is happy to travel among them in the above; and they, her children, feel safe, and sing and dance as she passes along. But the mother, she cannot help that some of her children must be swallowed by the father every month. It is ordered that way by