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 drew his body out of the water, and donned the coarse garment that was his daily wear. Then, a god confessed, he stood, godlike, on the flags of the big causeway, delighting in the strength and beauty of his young manhood, and in the glorious, strange world into which he had been new-born—the world which the god in him should presently shape to his will.

Slowly the moon was freeing itself from its escort of clouds. Before Chun, at the causeway's end, the wide stairway that leads upward to the main entrance of the cloisters lay heaped in shadow. On either side of it, dimly seen, great cobras, seven-headed, fashioned monstrously in stone, writhed into the darkness. Lions in strange postures, and hideous giants, resting immense, folded hands on grounded clubs, flanked them, vague and ghostly in the uncertain light. Above them, the long, uneven line of the cloisters' roof-ridge ran away and lost itself in the obscurity to right and left; and over it again uprose the solid bulk of the temple and the huge cones in which it culminated. Every moment the strength of the moonlight increased, touching tenderly the carved edges of the towers, silvering the fretted stone-work, revealing hidden tints in moss and lichen, suggesting more than it disclosed, plunging great masses of the Wat into mystery and gloom. But the causeway, raised above the surrounding enclosure to a height of a dozen feet, was white, all white, with every rigid line of it clearly defined;