After a long journey Gud came to a place where it looked as if it needed rain. So he sat down upon a cactus and took out his horoscope and consulted the stars. Then he made an elliptical ring around a new moon and hung the moon low in the sky. And Gud took a scarlet runner bean and put it in a pot and lit a fire of cactus thorns and set the pot to boil. When the thorns began to crackle, an arrogant savor arose from the pot, and the vapors of it filled the sky, and through the vapors the new-made moon shown red as the blood of saints torn by lions because of their faith.
Gud blew his breath on the fire and it waxed hot as anger and the pot boiled over and quenched the fire. Gud reached his hand into the pot and drew out the bean and cut it into three halves. And the left half of the bean he ate, and the right half of the bean he cast into Hell, but the other half of the bean Gud planted beneath a flat stone that bore the footprint of a hero who had passed that way when the stone was but a drifting sand on a lonely shore.
Presently the bean half sprouted, and the sprout split the stone athwart and rent the footprint of the hero. Gud watered the bean with tears, because there was no rain in that place. So the bean grew and on its stem were the leaves of the maiden-hair tree, and the tendrils by which the bean clambered were the tendrils of the snake-feeder vine, and the flowers that sprang from the nodules of the bean stalk were the flowers of the wormwood tree, but they gave forth the odor of liverworts and were of the color of faded hopes or of stale music.
Gud cut marks on the bean pole to observe the rate of growth of the bean vine, and he found that it grew much faster than grief dies but not so fast as jealousy is born.
And when the bean reached the top of the pole and could grow no more, it conceived and bore a fruit that was like a ripe gourd. Four eyes grew in the face of the fruit and a dim light shone out of the eyes. And Gud heard the patter of tiny feet within, and presently the ghosts of three blind mice came out of the four eyes of the fruit, one out of each of the four eyes, for the third one came out twice.
Oh, under the stars are things to see that fold
Their shining webs around the hidden sun....
When the flesh is faint and the heart grows limp and old,
Surely the work of living is not done.
There was a breathless stillness and the crowd
Leaned forward, looking on and barely stirred.
The surgeon, knife in hand, with spotted shroud,
Cut close around the heart and said no word.
They saw his patient die, and whispered one
Unto another in the clinic there.
But yet the surgeon saw strange actions done
That streaked his head with strands of snow-white hair.
From out the dead man's open chest there crept
A shaggy spider shining in the light,
That shook itself like one who having slept
Puts vainly back the shadows of the night.
The surgeon clutched his throat. Within his breast
He felt a living thing twist here and there;
A thing that stirred from out a deep unrest
Like something moving through a drowned man's hair.