Before there was a world there was P'an Ku, the fashioner who "chiselled the universe out of Chaos" over eighteen thousand years, a hammer in one hand and a chisel in the other, attended in some pictures by four creatures — unicorn, phoenix, tortoise, and dragon. The record shows him as "a man of dwarfish stature clothed in bearskin," horned, the offspring of yin and yang, the dual powers of Nature; his very name marks him as hatched from "the shell of an egg" out of the primal Chaos. Day by day he grew six feet taller, and the sun and moon were among the first fruits of his labour — until, that labour ended, "he died that his works might live."

His death is the making of everything. "His head became the mountains, his breath the wind and clouds"; his blood ran out into the rivers, his flesh settled as the soil, his voice went on as thunder; and — humblest turn of all — "the insects creeping over his body human beings". The witness is the 1922 compilation Myths & Legends of China, which dates the tale surprisingly late, crediting its invention to "the Taoist recluse, Magistrate Ko Hung" in the fourth century of our era, and pausing to note how nearly this Chinese maker resembles "Ymer, the giant" of the Scandinavian ballad, whose slain body likewise becomes the world.

The shelf files no companion to this one Chinese witness; the whole address rests on P'an Ku alone. If the maker must be spent entirely into what he makes — mountains for a head, rivers for blood — is such creation a gift, or a kind of dying?