In the morning, when broad daylight had come, the youth opened his eyes and started. It seemed as though there were more light than there should be in the house. He looked up, and the room which had been so fine and finished the night before was tottering over his head; the winds shrieked through great crevices in the walls; the windows were broken and wide open; sand sifted through on the wind and eddied down into the old, barren room. The rafters, dried and warped with age, were bending and breaking, and pieces of the roof fell now and then when the wind blew more strongly. He raised himself, and clammy bones fell from around him; and when he cast his eyes about him, there on the floor were strewn bones and skulls. Here and there a face half buried in the sand, with eyes sunken and dried and patches of skin clinging to it, seemed to glare at him. Fingers and feet, as of mummies, were strewn about, and it was as if the youth had entered a great cemetery, where the remains of the dead of all ages were littered about. He lifted himself still farther, and where the head of one maiden had lain or the arms of another had entwined with his, bones were clinging to him. One by one he picked them off stealthily and laid them down, until at last he freed himself, and, rising, cautiously stepped between the bones which were lying around, making no noise until he came to the broken-down doorway of the place. There, as he passed out, his foot tripped against a splinter of bone which was embedded in the debris of the ruin, and as a sliver sings in the wind, so this sang out. The youth, startled and terrorized, sprang forth and ran for his life in the direction of the home of the Storks. Shrieking, howling, and singing like a slivered stick in the wind, like creaking boughs in the forest, with groans and howls and whistlings that seemed to freeze the youth as he ran, these bones and fragments of the dead arose and, like a flock of vampires, pursued him noisily.
He ran and ran, and the great cloud of the dead were coming nearer and nearer and pressing round him, when he beheld one of his grandparents, a Badger, near its hole. The Badger, followed by others, was fast approaching him, having heard this fearful clamor, and cried out: “Our grandson! Let’s save him!” So they ran forward and, catching him up, cast him down into one of their holes. Then, turning toward the uncanny crowd and bristling up, with sudden emotion and mighty effort they cast off that odor by which, as you know, they may defile the very winds. _Thlitchiii!_ it met the crowd of ghosts. _Thliwooo!_ the whole host of them turned with wails and howls and gnashings of teeth back toward the City of the Dead, whence they had come. And the Badgers ran into the hole where lay the youth, lifted him up, and scolded him most vigorously for his folly.