Even then the Buddha smiled on the other verge. And ere the Bodhisattva could fall, there suddenly arose from the depths of the pit of fire a vast and beautiful lotus-flower, like unto that from whose womb of gold was Brahma born; and it received the feet of the Bodhisattva, and bore him beyond the pit, upcasting over him a spray of golden dust like a shower of stars. So he poured into the Buddha's bowl the holy gift of alms.
The darkness vanished; the abyss was not; the Buddha, rising in air, passed over a bridge of rosy cloud to the mountain regions of Himalaya. But the Bodhisattva, still standing upon the lotus of gold, long discoursed unto the people concerning holy things.
[RUNES FROM THE KALEWALA]
[THE MAGICAL WORDS]
There is in the ancient Finnish tongue a strange book written, called "Kalewala," a book of runes, treating about the beginning of the world, and about the god-smiths who first wrought the foundations of the sky, and about the witches and the enchanters of the farthest North. Of witches Louhi was among the greatest; and her daughter was wooed by gods and heroes—even by Wainamoinen the mightiest.... So fair was the virgin that her beauty gave light like the moon; so white were her bones that their whiteness glimmered through the transparency of her flesh; so clear was the ivory of her bones that the marrow could be seen within them.... And the story of how Wainamoinen built a boat that he might sail to woo the virgin, is thus told in the runes of the "Kalewala":
...The aged and valiant Wainamoinen resolved to build himself a boat, a swift war-boat. He hewed the trees, he hewed the trunks of the pines and the firs, singing songs the while, chanting the runes that banish evil. And as he sang the smitten trees answered him, the fibres of the oak and of the fir and of the mountain pine yielded up their secrets in sounds that to other men seemed echoes only, but which to Wainamoinen's ears were syllables and words—words wrung from the wood by enchantment.
Now only the keel remained to be wrought; the strong keel of the war-ship had yet to be fashioned. And Wainamoinen smote down a great oak, that he might carve and curve its body as keels are curved and carven. But the dying oak uttered its words of wood, its magical voice of warning, saying: "Never may I serve for the keel of thy boat, for the bottom of thy war-ship. Lo! the worms have made their crooked dwellings within my roots: yesterday the raven alighted upon my head; bloody was his back, bloody his crest, and blood lay clotting upon the blackness of his neck."