The Human-Faced Swine That Eats Men and Heralds the Deluge
Yan Mountain, in the fourth eastern guideway, is rich in gold and jade. Its beast is the heyu: the body of a pig under a human face, yellow-bodied with a scarlet tail, its voice the crying of an infant. The text is unusually specific about its diet: 'it eats men, and also eats insects and snakes' — human flesh sharing the menu with vermin, nothing refused. And its appearance announces catastrophe at the largest scale the book uses: 'when it is seen, there are great floods under heaven.'
Human-faced beasts form a lineage of their own in the classic, and an infant's cry is the man-eater's favourite lure: the paoxiao of the northern guideways and the longzhi of the eastern second guideway both mask their appetites with a baby's wail. The heyu is the family's eastern representative. Note the magnitude of its omen — the zhuru's panic touches only 'its state', but the heyu's flood covers 'all under heaven'. A strange pig on one mountain, and the whole world's rivers rise: no eastern portent carries a heavier charge.
Its neighbours in the same guideway complete the set: the fei of Tai Mountain brings universal pestilence, the bo fish of Nüzheng Mountain universal drought. Flood, plague, and drought stand on adjacent summits — the fourth eastern guideway reads like a catalogue of early warnings, with the heyu holding the seat for water.
