The crash with which that vast mass of painted and gilded clay struck the stone pavement, where it was shattered into a thousand fragments, was echoed by shrieks of terror as the dismayed beholders of this dire calamity plunged in headlong flight from the temple. Never before in all the annals of priesthood had been recorded a manifestation of godly anger so frightful and so unmistakable. From this time on, that particular temple of the rain-god was a place accursed and to be shunned; for if after this warning any person should enter it, he would be crushed to death beneath the body of the idol, which surely would fall on him.
So the people fled, spreading far and wide the dreadful news, and only one among them dared return to the temple and brave the rain-god's anger. This one, of course, was Jo, who, startled and alarmed by what had taken place, had fled with the others. But he had paused while still within the shelter of the grove, and, flinging himself to the ground for concealment, had allowed the others to pass on without him. When all had disappeared he arose and returned to the temple. As he re-entered its dust-clouded doorway he was confronted by a spectacle at once so amazing and so absurd that for an instant he gazed at it bewildered. Then he burst into almost uncontrollable laughter.
The image of the rain-god already had acquired a new head, dishevelled and dust-covered, to be sure, but one endowed with speech as well as with motion, and which, when Jo first saw it, was violently coughing.
"I say, Jo Lee," called out a husky voice from this new feature of the giant image, "I think it was a mean trick to go off and leave me shut up in that beastly place. I mighty near smothered in there, and I don't suppose I ever would have got out if an earthquake or something hadn't happened. It almost shook down the whole house, and it knocked the roof off as it was, nearly burying me in falling plaster besides."
"It isn't a house," explained Jo, laughing hysterically in spite of his habitual Chinese self-control. "It's the image of a god. Don't you remember crawling into it last night? I don't know how its head happened to tumble off, but I expect you did it yourself. And now you have managed to give it a new one, a hundred times more useful but not half so good looking. I never in all my life saw anything so funny, and if you only could see yourself, you'd laugh, too."
"Maybe I would," replied Rob, with a tone of injured dignity; "but if you were as battered and choked as I am, you wouldn't laugh—I know that much. Of course, I remember now all about this thing being a god, only I was so confused when I woke up that I forgot all about where I was. I only knew that there had been an explosion of some kind, and that I should smother if I didn't get out. I could see a little light up above and tried to climb to it by some ropes that I found dangling. Two of them gave way slowly, while a third was so rotten that it gave way mighty sudden. Then came the earthquake and an avalanche of mud that nearly buried me; but I managed somehow to climb on top of it, and here I am. Now I want to get down and out, for I don't like the place."
"All right. Drop down inside, and I will open the door."
Accepting this advice, Rob withdrew the head that had looked so absurdly small on top of that great image, and in another minute slid out of the open doorway far below, in company with a quantity of débris.
"Whew!" he gasped. "That was a sure enough dust-bath. Now let us get outside and into an atmosphere that isn't quite so thick with mud."
"Wouldn't you rather remain in here and live than go out and meet a certain death?" asked Jo, quietly.