“Leaning back munching a piece of yellow yam”
“Well, I think I have told you,” said Chee-Chee, “pretty nearly all there was to tell. In the Days Before There Was a Moon, as Grandmother always began, Otho Bludge was a man alone, a man apart. Making pictures on horn and bone with a stone knife, that was his hobby. His great ambition was to make a picture of Man. But there was no one to draw from, for Otho Bludge was a man alone. One day, when he wished aloud for some one to make a picture from, he saw this beautiful girl—Pippiteepa was her name—kneeling on a rock waiting for him to make a portrait of her. He made it—the best work he ever did, carved into the flat of a reindeer’s antler. About her right ankle she wore a string of blue stone beads. When the picture was finished she started to disappear again into the mountains’ evening mist, as mysteriously as she had come. Otho called to her to stay. She was the only human being he had ever seen besides his own image in the pools. He wanted her company, poor Otho Bludge, the carver of horn, the man apart. But even as she passed into the twilight forever she cried out to him that she could not stay—for she was of the Fairy Folk and not of his kin. He rushed to the rock where she had knelt; but all he found was the string of blue stone beads which she had worn about her ankle. Otho, broken-hearted, took them and bound them on his own wrist where he wore them night and day, hoping always that she would come back.
“There is nothing more. We youngsters used to pester my grandmother for a continuance of the tale. It seemed so sad, so unsatisfying, an ending. But the old lady insisted that that was the end. Not long after apparently Otho Bludge, the carver of horn and the man apart, just disappeared, completely, as though the Earth had swallowed him up.”
“Humph!” muttered the Doctor. “Have you any idea when?”
“No,” said the monkey. “You see, even my grandmother’s ideas of time and place in these stories she told us were very hazy. She had only had them handed down to her by her parents and grandparents, just as she passed them on to us. But I am pretty sure it was around the time of the Great Flood. Grandmother used to divide her stories into two periods: those belonging to The Days Before There Was a Moon and those that happened after. The name of Otho Bludge the artist only came into those before.”
“I see,” said the Doctor thoughtfully. “But tell me: can you recall anything your grandmother said about the time of the change—I mean, when the one period left off and the other began?”
“Not a very great deal,” said Chee-Chee. “It was the same when we questioned her about the Flood. That that event had taken place, there was no doubt; but, except for a few details, very little seemed to have been handed down as to how it came about, or of what was going on on the Earth at the time, or immediately after it. I imagine they were both great catastrophes—perhaps both came together—and such confusion fell upon all creatures that they were far too busy to take notes, and too scattered afterwards to keep a very clear picture in their minds. But I do remember that my grandmother said the first night when the Moon appeared in the sky some of our monkey ancestors saw a group of men kneeling on a mountain-top worshiping it. They had always been sun-worshipers and were now offering up prayers to the Moon also, saying it must be the Sun’s Wife.”
“But,” asked the Doctor, “did not Man know that the Moon must have flown off from the Earth?”
“That is not very clear,” said Chee-Chee. “We often questioned my grandmother on this point. But there were certainly some awful big gaps in her information. It was like a history put together from odd bits that had been seen from different sides of the Earth and filled in by gossip and hearsay generations after. It seems that to begin with the confusion was terrible. Darkness covered the Earth, the noise of a terrible explosion followed and there was great loss of life. Then the sea rushed into the hole that had been made, causing more havoc and destruction still. Man and beast slunk into caves for shelter or ran wild across the mountains, or just lay down and covered their eyes to shut out the dreadful vision. From what Monkey History has to relate, none lived who had actually seen the thing take place. But that I have always doubted. And much later there was a regular war among mankind when human society had pulled itself together again sufficiently to get back to something like the old order.”
“What was the war about?” asked the Doctor.