When the rain is wanted, someone must pour it. In the Chinese Ministry of Thunder and Storms that office falls to "Yü Shih, the Master of Rain", pictured "clad in yellow scale-armour", standing upon a cloud and tipping water down "from a watering-can" onto the earth; sometimes he balances a small dragon on a plate in his left hand while his right hand rains. The record adds plainly that he is "the Parjanya of Vedism" — Parjanya being the Vedic rain-god of India — one deity glimpsed twice across two mythologies.

A second witness stands beside him. During "a terrible drought" under the ancient reign of Shên Nung, a magician named Ch'ih Sung-tzu was asked to bring rain; he called for water in an earthen bowl, plucked a branch from a mountain and "soaked it in the water", sprinkled the ground, and at once "rain fell in torrents", filling the rivers to overflowing. For this he was honoured as the God of Rain, and his images still show him holding the mystic bowl. Even the weather keeps an omen-bird: the one-legged shang yang, which Confucius names for a puzzled prince as "a sign of rain", after which the whole country floods.

Only this Chinese witness is wired to served text on our shelf. Thompson's other rain-gods — the Greek Zeus, the Hindu and Buddhist authorities, the Maya and Aztec, the Hawaiian and Samoan and Easter Island — wait unread beside it. What is striking is how domestic the sky becomes: not a storm-god raging but a functionary with a watering-can, a bureau with a birthday, rain as a matter of the right official at his post. When rain is an office and not a mood, who is at fault in the drought — the god, or the ministry that failed to send him?