THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
Mount Yidi carries jade above and gold below. Its beast, the Juru, is shaped like a fei-rat — one of the rodents listed in the Erya glossary, which commentators since Han times have failed to identify with any certainty — with white ears and a white muzzle. The formula of consequence stands out of all proportion to the animal: wherever it appears, that state will see great armies raised.
The eleventh central sequence is thick with such omen beasts. On Mount Feng the Yonghe, an ape-like creature with red eyes and a red muzzle, portends great panic; on Mount Fuzhou the Qizhong, an owl-shaped bird with a single foot and a pig's tail, portends plague. Panic, pestilence and war each have their courier in these hills, and the little white-eared herald of war is the least conspicuous of them all.
