“The wind has changed,” answered Mary.  “It was cool and sweet when we dropped off, and now it’s like a wind that’s blown over a desert.”

Through the forest came a murmur like thousands of voices gathering in strength and volume all the time.  The gigantic pillars of the cathedral began swaying and tossing their arched boughs and the whole mountain seemed to resound with strange sounds, cries and calls, grindings and poundings.  The pin prick stars disappeared and the place was as black as the pit.

The two girls rose quickly and clasped hands again.

“I think we’d better go straight down,” said Billie.  “We’re obliged to strike a path somewhere and perhaps we may find a temple or a tomb or a pagoda or something.  Anything to get away from that awful thing that’s coming, whatever it is.”

Fortunately the act of descending gave them a sense of direction.  Many times they fell, skinning their shins and their foreheads against trees, but they picked themselves up again, entirely unconscious of bruises, and ran on as fast as they could go with the hot devastating wind behind them.  Suddenly the whole mountainside was illuminated by a flash of lightning, like a jagged stream of fire stretching from heaven to earth.  A deafening roar of thunder followed.  Then all the forest seemed to be perfectly quiet.  Such a stillness settled over the place that the girls stopped and held their breath.

“Look,” whispered Billie, pointing to a strange looking light coming rapidly nearer, wobbling and undulating like the light on the bow of a ship in a rough ocean.  Then came another terrifying flash of lightning, and thunder that seemed to rock the whole world.  The two girls rushed toward the friendly light with one accord, and collided with the bearer with such force that three persons were precipitated with unintentionally devotional attitudes at the foot of a shrine of Buddha.

“By Jove, but this is luck,” called a familiar voice.

It was Nicholas Grimm, who calmly picked up himself and then his oil-paper lantern attached to the end of a slender wand; next he helped the girls to their feet.

“Take an arm, each one of you.  There’s no time to lose.  The thing that’s coming, whatever it is, will get here in a minute now.”

Running like mad, on the very wings of the wind, the three young people followed the windings of the path and presently came up short on a small temple, the tomb of some holy personage.  Into this they rushed without ceremony just as the storm burst with all its fury, and crouching in a corner just out of reach of the rain, they listened to the howls and shrieks of the wind.

“It’s just like some live thing,” remarked Mary after a while.  “I feel as if some terrible demon lived up in a cave in the mountain, and when he is angry he comes down and lashes the earth and shakes the mountain.”

Mary’s poetic notion of storms in that region was not so far removed from the Japanese legends.