The Records and the Chronicles agree in ascribing to her such an exercise of resolute force that she stamps her feet into the ground as though it had been soft snow and scatters the earth about. Susanoo, however, disavows all evil intentions, and agrees to prove his sincerity by taking an oath and engaging in a Kami-producing competition, the condition being that if his offspring be female, the fact shall bear condemnatory import, but if male, the verdict shall be in his favour. For the purpose of this trial, they stand on opposite sides of a river (the Milky Way). Susanoo hands his sword to Amaterasu-o-mi-Kami, who breaks it into three pieces, chews the fragments, and blowing them from her mouth, produces three female Kami. She then lends her string of five hundred jewels to Susanoo and, he, in turn, crunches them in his mouth and blows out the fragments which are transformed into five male Kami. The beings thus strangely produced have comparatively close connexions with the mundane scheme, for the three female Kami--euphoniously designated Kami of the torrent mist, Kami of the beautiful island, and Kami of the cascade--become tutelary goddesses of the shrines in Chikuzen province (or the sacred island Itsuku-shima), and two of the male Kami become ancestors of seven and twelve families, respectively, of hereditary nobles. On the "high plain of heaven," however, trouble is not allayed. The Sun goddess judges that since female Kami were produced from the fragments of Susanoo's sword and male Kami from her own string of jewels, the test which he himself proposed has resulted in his conviction; but he, repudiating that verdict, proceeds to break down the divisions of the rice-fields laid out by the goddess, to fill up the ditches, and to defile the palace--details which suggest either that, according to Japanese tradition, heaven has its agriculture and architecture just as earth has, or that the "plain of high heaven" was really the name of a place in the Far East. The Sun goddess makes various excuses for her brother's lawless conduct, but he is not to be placated. His next exploit is to flay a piebald horse and throw it through a hole which he breaks in the roof of the hall where the goddess is weaving garments for the Kami. In the alarm thus created, the goddess* is wounded by her shuttle, whereupon she retires into a cave and places a rock at the entrance, so that darkness falls upon the "plain of high heaven" and upon the islands of Japan,** to the consternation of the Kami of evil, whose voices are heard like the buzzing of swarms of flies. *According to the Records, it is the attendants of the goddess that suffer injury.