husband, “Whenever a foreigner is about to give birth to a child, she takes the shape of her native land. I now will take my native shape. Pray look not upon me!” The Prince, thinking her words very strange, stealthily looked upon her at the moment of delivery, when she turned into a crocodile eight fathoms long, and crawled and writhed about. Terrified at the sight, he fled away.
The Princess knew then that he had looked upon her, and she felt ashamed. Straightway leaving the child she had borne, she said, “I had wished always to come and go across the paths of the sea to you. But now I feel ashamed because you have seen me in my real shape.” So she closed the boundary of the sea and went down again. But though she remained angry that he had wished to look upon her, she could not restrain her loving heart, and she entrusted to her younger sister, when she was nursing the child, a song for the Prince, which said: “Even though the string on which the red jewels are strung shines, my lord who is like white jewels is yet more beautiful.”
Her husband replied with a song which said: “My dear wife, whom I took to sleep with me on the island where light the wild duck, the birds of the offing, I shall not forget you till the end of my life.”
Prince Fire-fade dwelt in his palace of Takachiho for five hundred and eighty years, and his tomb is likewise on the west of Mount Takachiho.
