“Mo-ye was a good wife. She, no less than her husband, deserved to give her name to one of the swords. Her devotion was total. But it did not go as far as having her body immediately consumed. Like Yu the Great, T’ang, and the Duke of Cheou, the husband and wife cut their hair and trimmed their nails. Together, they threw the nail trimmings and hair into the furnace. They gave part to give the whole.

“As the couple were performing their act of devotion, Yin and Yang mixed their breaths to help along the fusion: the bellows were worked by three hundred VIRGIN girls AND boys.

“Another author repeats this number of three hundred; according to him, VIRGIN girls ALONE were called to procure the breath.

“Mo-ye, according to one version, performs the act of devotion ALONE.²⁵⁷ She throws herself into the furnace. That was a story of holy union, a marriage with the god of the furnace.” The Chinese irony of the nails and hair in the furnace doesn’t hide the original form of the sacrifice: hierogamy and suicide. Sali and Far-li-mas, skilled smelters, separate the elements of the sacrifice. They couple among the sleepers, protected by the veil of the word. And they let the priests be killed, struck down by the word of the ordeal, as by the sword that the sacrifice helps to fuse. The lifeless corpses of the priests substitute those of the hierogamic couple in the furnace, as though they were the nails and hair of Mo-ye and Kan-tsiang.

Sali and Far-li-mas defeat the priests because they remain awake, he narrating, she listening. All is shifted into the simple act of consciousness. In the old order of sacrifice, the post to which the victim was tied existed in the mind and in the world. And there was no possibility of distinction. Everything now goes back to being invisible: the sacrificial offering is the story. What remains visible is the conflict with the previous order, which finds its last victims in the priests. The sacrifice is reabsorbed into perfect wakefulness.

At Naphta there is an ordeal between the order of the blood sacrifice, dependent on stars in the sky, and the order of a life without attachments, which speaks in the stories of Far-li-mas and will be camouflaged in history. In the ordeal, Far-li-mas wins—and history begins. But it is a short-lived victory, a victory for a single dual subject: Far-li-mas and Sali. In truth, both orders are condemned to ruin.

Far-li-mas does not oppose the sacrifice: when Akaf announces that he has chosen him as a “companion in death,” Far-li-mas is not frightened. The frightened one is Sali—the victorious Antigone and African Eurydice. And Far-li-mas recognizes in her a “will” that seeks a new “way.” Far-li-mas’s surging “gift of storytelling,” overwhelming only to the point of intoxication, substitutes the “writing in the sky” that dictates the rise of nature and the recurrence of assassinations. As Sali has told the priest, “life on earth”—fluctuating, changeable, with no preestablished order, like the stories of Far-li-mas—has been proved to be a work “greater” than the “writing in the sky.” Sali’s “way” is in an indelible phrase: “From that day no one else was killed at Naphta.”