in the following chapters before I return to the personal adventures of
Arowhena and myself.
    They were idolaters, though of a comparatively enlightened kind; but here,
as in other things, there was a discrepancy between their professed and actual
belief, for they had a genuine and potent faith which existed without
recognition alongside of their idol worship.
    The gods whom they worship openly are personifications of human qualities,
as justice, strength, hope, fear, love, etc., etc. The people think that
prototypes of these have a real objective existence in a region far beyond the
clouds, holding, as did the ancients, that they are like men and women both in
body and passion, except that they are even comelier and more powerful, and also
that they can render themselves invisible to human eyesight. They are capable of
being propitiated by mankind and of coming to the assistance of those who ask
their aid. Their interest in human affairs is keen, and on the whole beneficent;
but they become very angry if neglected, and punish rather the first they come
upon, than the actual person who has offended them; their fury being blind when
it is raised, though never raised without reason. They will not punish with any
less severity when people sin against them from ignorance, and without the
chance of having had knowledge; they will take no excuses of this kind, but are
even as the English law, which assumes itself to be known to every one.
    Thus they have a law that two pieces of matter may not occupy the same space
at the same moment, which law is presided over and administered by the gods of
time and space jointly, so that if a flying stone and a man's head attempt to
outrage these gods, by »arrogating a right which they do not possess« (for so it
is written in one of their books), and to occupy the same space simultaneously,
a severe punishment, sometimes even death itself, is sure to follow, without any
regard to whether the stone knew that the man's head was there, or the head the
stone; this at least is their view of the common accidents of life. Moreover,
they hold their deities to be quite regardless of motives. With them it is the
thing done which is everything, and the motive goes for nothing.
    Thus they hold it strictly forbidden for a man to go without common air in
his lungs for more than a very few minutes; and if by any chance he gets into
the water, the air-god is very angry, and will not suffer it;