Again he sang, saying:
"Let those whose life may be complete stick in their hair as a headdress the leaves of the bear-oak from Mount Heguri those children!"
This song is a land-regretting song. Again he sang, saying:
"How sweet! ah! from the direction of home clouds are rising and coming!"
This is an incomplete song. At this time, his august sickness was very urgent. Then he sang augustly, saying:
"The saber-sword which I placed at the maiden's bedside, alas! that sword!"
As soon as he had finished singing, he died. Then a courier was dispatched to the Heavenly Sovereign.
YAMATO-TAKE TURNS INTO A WHITE BIRD
Thereupon his Empresses[1] and likewise his august children, who dwelt in Yamato, all went down[2] and built an august mausoleum, and, forthwith crawling hither and thither in the rice-fields encompassing the mausoleum, sobbed out a song, saying:
"The Dioacorea quinqueloba crawling hither and thither among the rice-stubble, among the rice-stubble in the rice-fields encompassing the mausoleum. . . ."[3]
Thereupon the dead prince, turning into a white dotterel[4] eight fathoms long, and soaring up to Heaven, flew off toward the shore. Then the Empress and likewise the august chil-
- ↑ I.e., wives. It will be remembered that the historian habitually mentions Yamato-take as if he had been Emperor.
- ↑ Q.d., to the land of Ise.
- ↑ The drift of the song is a comparison of the helpless wanderings of the mourners in the neighborhood of the tomb to the convolutions of the Dioscorea quinqueloba (a creeping plant) growing among the rice in the adjacent fields. But there are evidently some lines omitted.
- ↑ As usual when the word chidori (defined as "any kind of dotterel, plover, or sandpiper") is used, it is doubtful what bird is really intended. At the end of this section we are told that the mausoleum was called the "Mausoleum of the White Bird." Specifically, however, these characters are used with their Sinico-Japanese pronunciation of hakuchō as the name of the swan.
