Scarcely had the shabby race of sons of the soil commenced to dabble in the mud of the nourishing earth than, pressed by the furious desire to eat, they forgot the splendid sun, the eternal epiphany in which they were permitted to live. As the engraver, applying himself to cut his block according to the grain of the wood, occupies himself but little with the lamp above his head, which lights him; just so the farmer, reducing his whole view to that of his two hands and the black back of his buffalo, caring only to plow his furrows straight, forgot the luminous heart of the universe. Then Amaterasu was indignant in the sun. She is the soul of the sun by which it shines, and she is the breath in its sounding trumpet. “When the beasts,” she said, “have filled their bellies, they love me, they rejoice with simplicity in my caresses; they sleep in the warmth of my glance, lulled by the regular beating of their blood within their bodies, the inner rhythm of their crimson life; but Man, brutal and impious, is never sated with eating. All day long the flowers adore me, and nourish their devout hearts in the splendor of my face. Only Man is badly set on his stem. He deprives me of the sacred mirror in him that was made for my reflection. Let us fly, then, let us hide this beauty that is not honored!” Like a dove which slips into a hole in a wall, she descended into a deep cavern at the mouth of the river Yokigawa and, with an enormous rock, hermetically sealed the enclosure. It grew dark--not the ordinary blackness of night, but the very darkness there was before the world was made. Crude and atrocious blackness filled the living earth. There was a strange vacancy in the sky; space had lost its center, the person of the sun had vanished like some one who disappears, like a judge who leaves his court. Then these ingrates knew the beauty of Amaterasu. How they searched in the drear air! A great sigh ran through all the islands,--the agony of penitence, the abomination of fear. As in the evening the mosquitoes in myriads fill the stagnant air, the earth was delivered to the brigandage of demons, and of the dead whom one could recognize by this sign: that they had no navels. As a pilot covers his nearest lights, the better to see into the distance; so, by the suppression of this central lamp, space widened around them. And, from a part of the horizon unseen before, they saw a strange whiteness beyond the sky, like the frontier of a neighboring world: the reflection of another sun.