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.

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 ea