IN
the days of the Emperor Yau lived a prince by the name of Hou I, who
was a mighty hero and a good archer. Once ten suns rose together in the
sky, and shone so brightly and burned so fiercely that the people on
earth could not endure them. So the Emperor ordered Hou I to shoot at
them. And Hou I shot nine of them down from the sky. Besides his bow,
Hou I also had a horse which ran so swiftly that even the wind could
not catch up with it. He mounted it to go a-hunting, and the horse ran
away and could not be stopped. So Hou I came to Kunlun Mountain and met
the Queen-Mother of the Jasper Sea. And she gave him the herb of
immortality. He took it home with him and hid it in his room. But his
wife who was named Tschang O, once ate some of it on the sly when he
was not at home, and she immediately floated up to the clouds. When she
reached the moon, she ran into the castle there, and has lived there
ever since as the Lady of the Moon.
[54]
On a night in mid-autumn, an emperor of the Tang dynasty once sat at
wine with two sorcerers. And one of them took his bamboo staff and cast
it into the air, where it turned into a heavenly bridge, on which the
three climbed up to the moon together. There they saw a great castle on
which was inscribed: “The Spreading Halls of Crystal Cold.” Beside it
stood a cassia tree which blossomed and gave forth a fragrance filling
all the air. And in the tree sat a man who was chopping off the smaller
boughs with an ax. One of the sorcerers said: “That is the man in the
moon. The cassia tree grows so luxuriantly that in the course of time
it would overshadow all the moon’s radiance. Therefore it has to be cut
down once in every thousand years.” Then they entered the spreading
halls. The silver stories of the castle towered one above the other,
and its walls and columns were all formed of liquid crystal. In the
walls were cages and ponds, where fishes and birds moved as though
alive. The whole moon-world seemed made of glass. While they were still
looking about them on all sides the Lady of the Moon stepped up to
them, clad in a white mantle and a rainbow-colored gown. She smiled and
said to the emperor: “You are a prince of the mundane world of dust.
Great is your fortune, since you have been able to find your way here!”
And she called for her attendants, who came flying up on white birds,
and sang and danced beneath the cassia tree. A pure clear music floated
through the air. Beside the tree stood a mortar made of white marble,
in which a jasper rabbit ground up herbs. That was the dark half of the
moon. When the dance had ended, the emperor returned to earth again
with the sorcerers. And he had the songs which he had heard on the moon
written down and sung to the accompaniment of flutes of jasper in his
pear-tree garden.
Fairies, Fairy Tales, Fairy Books
Stories
About Fairies Read
Fairies Tales
A series of tales about and from the perspective of fairies. These are
a series of individual short tales which together tell the
tale of how fairies compete and manipulate the world around them.
Primal
Fairies -
The story of ancient European fairies of the ancient and primal
forests.
