ock.

Then the mother said: "I am very thirsty!"

Oerlang climbed down into the valley in order to fetch her water, and
some time passed before he returned. When he did his mother was no
longer there. He searched eagerly, but on the rock lay only her skin
and bones, and a few blood-stains. Now you must know that at that time
there were still ten suns in the heavens, glowing and burning like
fire. The Daughter of Heaven, it is true, was divine by nature; yet
because she had incurred the anger of her father and had been banished
to earth, her magic powers had failed her. Then, too, she had been
imprisoned so long beneath the hills in the dark that, coming out
suddenly into the sunlight, she had been devoured by its blinding
radiance.

When Oerlang thought of his mother's sad end, his heart ached. He took
two mountains on his shoulders, pursued the suns and crushed them to
death between the mountains. And whenever he had crushed another
sun-disk, he picked up a fresh mountain. In this way he had already
slain nine of the ten suns, and there was but one left. And as Oerlang
pursued him relentlessly, he hid himself in his distress beneath the
leaves of the portulacca plant. But there was a rainworm close by who
betrayed his hiding-place, and kept repeating: "There he is! There he
is!"

Oerlang was about to seize him, when a messenger from the Ruler of the
Heaven suddenly descended from the skies with a command: "Sky, air and
earth need the sunshine. You must allow this one sun to live, so that
all created beings may live. Yet, because you rescued your mother, and
showed yourself to be a good son, you shall be a god, and be my
bodyguard in the Highest Heaven, and shall rule over good and evil in
the mortal world, and have power over devils and demons." When Oerlang
received this command he ascended to Heaven.

Then the sun-disk came out again from beneath the portulacca leaves,
and out of gratitude, since the plant had saved him, he bestowed upon
it the gift of a free-blooming nature, and ordained that it never need
fear the sunshine. To this very day one may see on the lower side of
the portulacca leaves quite delicate little white pearls. They are the
sunshine that remained hanging to the leaves when the sun hid under
them. But the sun pursues the rainworm, when he ventures forth out of
the ground, and dries him up as a punishment for his treachery.

Since that time Yang Oerlang has been honored as a god. He has
obl