offered it to the Goddess of Abundance in her temple Aoul Keroon. And
the Goddess was pleased with the gift, as all women are, and sent
pleasant dreams to Ap Ariph for seven nights straight from the moon.

And on the seventh night the gods held conclave together, on the
cloudy peaks they held it, above Narn, Ktoon, and Pti. So high their
peak arises that no man heard their voices. They spake on that cloudy
mountain (not the highest hamlet heard them). "What doth the Goddess
of Abundance," (but naming her Lling, as they name her), "what doth
she sending sweet dreams for seven nights to Ap Ariph?"

And the gods sent for their seer who is all eyes and feet, running to
and fro on the Earth, observing the ways of men, seeing even their
littlest doings, never deeming a doing too little, but knowing the web
of the gods is woven of littlest things. He it is that sees the cat
in the garden of parakeets, the thief in the upper chamber, the sin of
the child with the honey, the women talking indoors and the small
hut's innermost things. Standing before the gods he told them the
case of Ap Ariph and the wrongs of Meoul Ki Ning and the rape of the
lotus lily; he told of the cutting and making of Ap Ariph's bamboo
bow, of the shooting of Meoul Ki Ning, and of how the arrow hit him,
and the smile on the face of Lling when she came by the lotus bloom.

And the gods were wroth with Ap Ariph and swore to avenge Ki Ning.

And the ancient one of the gods, he that is older than Earth, called
up the thunder at once, and raised his arms and cried out on the gods'
high windy mountain, and prophesied on those rocks with runes that
were older than speech, and sang in his wrath old songs that he had
learned in storm from the sea, when only that peak of the gods in the