He had been both hungry and thirsty when he came into the cave, as he had not waited to have his mid-day meal with the other field-workers; but now he felt quite comforted and refreshed.
He sat there some time longer, and noticed that as the old men frowned over the chessboard, their beards grew longer and longer, until they swept the floor of the cave, and even found their way out of the door.
“I hope my beard will never grow as quickly,” said Wang Chih, as he rose and took up his axe again.
Then one of the old men spoke, for the first time. “Our beards have not grown quickly, young man. How long is it since you came here?”
“About half an hour, I dare say,” replied Wang Chih. But as he spoke, the axe crumbled to dust beneath his fingers, and the second chess-player laughed, and pointed to the little brown sweetmeats on the table.
“Half an hour, or half a century—aye, half a thousand years are all alike to him who tastes of these. Go down into your village and see what has happened since you left it.”
So Wang Chih went down as quickly as he could from the mountain, and found the fields where he had worked covered with houses, and a busy town where his own little village had been. In vain he looked for his house, his wife, and his children.
There were strange faces everywhere; and although when evening came the Feast of Lanterns was being held once more, there was no Ho-Seen-Ko carrying her red and yellow fish, or Han Chung with his flaming red ball.
At last he found a woman, a very, very old woman, who told him that when she was a tiny girl she remembered her grand-mother saying how, when she was a tiny girl, a poor young man had been spirited away by the Genii of the mountains on the day of the Feast of Lanterns, leaving his wife and little children with only a few handfuls of rice in the house.
“Moreover, if you wait while the procession passes, you will see two children dressed to represent Han Chung and Ho-Seen-Ko, and their mother carrying the empty rice-bowl between them; for this is done every year to remind people to take care of the widow and fatherless,” she said. So Wang Chih waited in the street; and in a little while the procession came to an end, and the last three figures in it were a boy and girl, dressed like his own two children, walking on either side of a young woman carrying a rice-bowl. But she was not like his wife in anything but her dress, and the children were not at all like Han Chung and Ho-Seen-Ko; and poor Wang Chih’s heart was very heavy as he walked out of the town.