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CHAPTER VI
THE PAGODA
He was spared that inconvenience. The untimely rain and cold, some
persons said, the few days of untimely heat following, had drowned or
dried, frozen or burnt out, the seeds of peril. But accounts varied,
reasons were plentiful. Soldiers had come down from the chow city,
two-score _li_ inland, and charging through the streets, hacking and
slashing the infested air, had driven the goblins over the walls, with a
great shout of victory. A priest had freighted a kite with all the evil,
then cut it adrift in the sky. A mob had dethroned the God of Sickness,
and banished his effigy in a paper junk, launched on the river at night,
in flame. A geomancer proclaimed that a bamboo grove behind the town
formed an angle most correct, germane, and pleasant to the Azure Dragon
and the White Tiger, whose occult currents, male and female, run
throughout Nature. For any or all of these reasons, the town was
delivered. The pestilence vanished, as though it had come but to grant
Monsieur Jolivet his silence, and to add a few score uncounted living
wretches to the dark, mighty, imponderable host of ancestors.
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