When the middle of the afternoon arrived, they saw the hills from which they had come rising against the sky to their left, and leaving the banks of the river they set out toward the higher country.
Several times they thought they had lost their way, but they kept on, and at last saw the surface of the great marsh stretching out before them. From here on, they had no trouble, and on the second night they reached the entrance to the valley. They were very tired, and hungry too, for the turtle meat they had brought along was all eaten up, but Ni-Va managed to spear some small fish along the edge of the marsh, so that their stomachs were not quite empty when they finally got home.
When they told their friends in the valley about the great water they had seen, stretching as far as their eyes could reach, the others would not believe them, and even the shells they had brought back did not convince the cave people that there could be a stream or river as big as that. Tul and Ni-Va offered to guide a party to the Ocean and show them, but the others only laughed, and thought the boys were not telling the truth. They were quite satisfied, in the valley, they said, and did not care to go to a place where the water was not fit to drink, and there was no fire, and no caves in which to sleep. But Tul and Ni-Va made up their minds that some day they would go back to the great water, and see it again.
The two boys were never tired of telling about their adventures, and were very proud of the necklaces they made of the shells Tul had brought back with him. They tried to make a log boat, like the one they had used to float down the great river, and because they could not find a log on the banks of the stream big enough to hold them, they got several smaller logs, and fastened them together with twisted ropes of grass, and in this way made a raft, and had great fun with it, riding down the swift-flowing stream that ran through the valley.
The Sun, who was watching them, laughed.
"Your little Men will never conquer the Ocean on a thing like that," he said, looking at the clumsy raft.
"Wait," said Mother Nature. "They will surprise you. That log, drifting in the river, was their first boat, and that raft, which is a little better, is their second. Some day, my children will take a log, and burn it out with fire, and make a canoe. And others will make strong frameworks of wood, or the bones of the whale, or twisted reeds, and cover these frameworks with the bark of trees, or skins, or pitch that they will find in the earth, and make canoes, and kyaks, and coracles. And later on, they will cover the frames of their boats with planks of wood, and put sails on them, and make ships that will carry them to the ends of the Earth. And they will even make ships of iron, and put great engines in them, and laugh at the storms of the Ocean, and conquer them, because they have brains with which to understand my laws."
"It sounds like a fairy tale," said the Sun.
"It is," said Mother Nature. "The most wonderful fairy tale in the world, because it is true."