its head is shaved. However, he does not know when the child lost its sight or why its head is shaved. Despite its blindness, the child seems to know where they are and where they are going. Its voice is childlike, but its words are mature. The dreamer grows ill at ease, and he resolves to abandon the child in the woods up ahead. As they enter the woods, the child directs the dreamer to the base of a cedar tree. The child states that he was killed by the dreamer, in this very place, on a similar night, a hundred years before. The dreamer remembers the night, and at the same moment the child grows heavy as stone. The Fourth Night An old man sits alone at a large table in an earthen-floored room, escaping the heat of the day. He drinks saké and converses enigmatically with the proprietress. When he departs, the dreamer, who is a young child, follows him to a willow where children are playing. The old man produces a towel and tells them to watch it become a snake. He blows a whistle and circles with dance-like steps, but the towel remains a towel. Finally, he puts the towel into his box and walks on, still insisting it will change. They reach the riverbank, but the old man doesn't stop. The dreamer watches him wade in, still hoping to see the snake when he emerges on the other bank. The old man, however, disappears beneath the surface and does not reappear. The Fifth Night The dreamer is defeated in battle and captured alive. Brought before the enemy general, he chooses death over capitulation. However, he requests to look one last time on the woman he loves before dying. The enemy general gives him until daybreak, when the cock crows, to summon his woman. The woman mounts her unsaddled white horse and races through the night, black hair streaming behind her. Suddenly, she hears the crowing of a cock from the darkened roadside and loses hope. When the cock crows a second time, she releases the taut reins, and horse and woman tumble into a deep canyon. The crowing of the cock was in fact Amanojaku, a mischievous goddess, who from that moment on is the dreamer's eternal nemesis. The Sixth Night The dreamer hears that Unkei is carving Niō guardians at the main gate of