shadows before her, and they followed Night. And suddenly the mystery
quitted haunting shapes, and an old glamour was gone, and far and wide
over the fields of earth a new splendour arose.




USURY


The men of Zonu hold that Yahn is God, who sits as a usurer behind a
heap of little lustrous gems and ever clutches at them with both his
arms. Scarce larger than a drop of water are the gleaming jewels that
lie under the grasping talons of Yahn, and every jewel is a life. Men
tell in Zonu that the earth was empty when Yahn devised his plan, and
on it no life stirred. Then Yahn lured to him shadows whose home was
beyond the Rim, who knew little of joys and nought of any sorrow, whose
place was beyond the Rim before the birth of Time. These Yahn lured to
him and showed them his heap of gems; and in the jewels there was
light, and green fields glistened in them, and there were glimpses of
blue sky and little streams, and very faintly little gardens showed
that flowered in orchard lands. And some showed winds in the heaven,
and some showed the arch of the sky with a waste plain drawn across it,
with grasses bent in the wind and never aught but the plain. But the
gems that changed the most had in their centre the ever changing sea.
Then the shadows gazed into the Lives and saw the green fields and the
sea and earth and the gardens of earth. And Yahn said: "I will loan you
each a Life, and you may do your work with it upon the Scheme of
Things, and have each a shadow for his servant in green fields and in
gardens, only for these things you shall polish these Lives with