Then Ynar went away and the guards touched him not.


_V_

Then spake the prophet Thun, who was clad in seaweed and had no Temple,
but lived apart from men. All his life he had lived on a lonely beach
and had heard for ever the wailing of the sea and the crying of the
wind in hollows among the cliffs. Some said that having lived so long
by the full beating of the sea, and where always the wind cries
loudest, he could not feel the joys of other men, but only felt the
sorrow of the sea crying in his soul for ever.

"Long ago on the path of stars, midmost between the worlds, there
strode the gods of Old. In the bleak middle of the worlds They sat and
the worlds went round and round, like dead leaves in the wind at
Autumn's end, with never a life on one, while the gods went sighing for
the things that might not be. And the centuries went over the gods to
go where the centuries go, toward the End of Things, and with Them went
the sighs of all the gods as They longed for what might not be.

"One by one in the midst of the worlds, fell dead the gods of Old,
still sighing for the things that might not be, all slain by Their own
regrets. Only Shimono Kani, the youngest of the gods, made him a harp
out of the heart strings of all the elder gods, and, sitting upon the
Path of Stars in the Middle of Things, played upon the harp a dirge for
the gods of Old. And the song told of all vain regrets and of unhappy
loves of the gods in the olden time, and of Their great deeds that were
to adorn the future years. But into the dirge of Shimono Kani came