“Her tongue is cut out next,” continued the growl in the darkness, “and this is the crowning stroke of mercy, for it stops her piteous cries.”
Again came an interrupting roar, low and sullen. The typhoon was near at hand but the older man raised his voice above the distant roar.
“Then they cut off her breast, where——”
Gnashing, grinding, the iron-toothed wind fell again upon the hapless suburbs, revolving in the opposite direction. It is what sailors call the return storm, when its cyclonic revolutions are reversed and the typhoon returns to complete its devastation. Going, the typhoon is a monster; returning, it is in addition, a maniac. What it has failed to destroy, it returns to mangle. The terrible winds now came from the northwest through the open side of the court, and the two men were no longer protected. The shed that had sheltered them was shattered by the first returning blast. Helpless and bleeding they were hurled together with the headless corpses into a corner of the court, making altogether a hideous pile but wherein the cadavers protected them from the debris that was hurled into the corner. It often happens that in these storms the dead succour the living.
The typhoon continued to shriek and to laugh triumphantly in the black and fiery abyss overhead. It was as if hell had been turned upside down and out of its vast chasm its green fires were being poured and all those bruised noises that are said to resound there.
The typhoon was making its departure, which is not less terrible than its coming. Screaming, hovering and hastening it makes its retreat; mangling what it has heretofore destroyed. In time it weakens and begins to linger, then exhausted it hesitates, stops, and whispers. Frenzied, it again wanders uncontrollably about; revolving always in the same circle and moving whimsically hither and thither until its strength is gradually expended. Quivering, shuddering, whimpering, it at last disappears again into the mother sea—a prodigal returned.
BOOK I. A WOMAN
CHAPTER ONE
IN THE VALLEY OF THE FOUNTAIN
Just south of where the Yangtse River empties into the ocean lies the Province of the Winding Stream—venerable and beautiful, with a history written back almost to that long hour when the world was yet supposed to be unmade by the hand of God—a nebulous vapour adrift in the night.
This province is one vast park of alternating hills and valleys, where peaks, cascades, and woodlands intervene in a fascinating confusion; where walled cities and temples rise majestically on all sides; where canals and watercourses, alive with boats, form a silvery network among fragrant hills and tree-hid hamlets, making it altogether just such a land as the imagination conceives belonging alone to the sunlit East.