Know then, gentle reader, that they were—mark well my words—the sole living creatures on the island of Gô-gû-lâh, upon which a strange fate had cast us. Whether or not any other beings had ever inhabited the island was unknown to them.
I found, upon conversing with their learned men, that there was a legend in existence among them—dim and shadowy in its details, from the long flight of centuries that it had come down through—that many thousands of years ago they had been quite like human beings, who walk upright, with bodies almost, if not quite, as long as mine; but that owing to the unvarying recurrence of terrible storms, of wind, rain, hail and snow, accompanied by the bursting of deafening thunderbolts, in fact, such as I had experienced, which swept over the island twelve times in the year, coming and going with a regularity as astonishing as their force is terrific, everything upright had long ago been swept from the land; that their ancestors, yielding to the irresistible forces of Nature, had gradually bent their bodies before these resistless winds, until even the time when they walked upright had been forgotten.
This was but the first change wrought by the forces which surrounded them. When overtaken by these wild winds, they soon learned that their only safety lay in rolling themselves up as much into the shape of balls as possible, so that the tornado would be powerless to pick them up and hurl them to destruction.
Another transformation now began to make itself apparent.
Their bodies, as centuries came and went, little by little, took on the rounded form they then had.
Still clinging to the desperate chance for life on these storm-swept plains, they drew down their heads and pressed in their limbs until these had made recesses for them, as some tortoises draw their legs so closely to their bodies that the eye fails to distinguish even the outline of the limb.
The last change that came upon these globe-shaped people was a very natural one: their arms took on a greater development of superhuman strength, while their legs grew shorter and shorter, until they consisted of little more than two broad, flexible feet, which they made use of mainly to propel their round bodies like huge balls across the vast plains of their island home.
Now, while they still dread the terrible blasts, yet is it rather an inherited fear, for at last they have become the true children of the gale.
If it should happen to blow in the direction of their homes, they simply allow it to help them on their way by rolling them across the plain. While, now and then, a lôb-bô, or “square” Roundbody, so to speak, would be blown into the ocean, yet for nearly a century not a single, genuine Roundbody had been caught up in the pitiless blast. As well might the wind attempt to pick up the round stones of the ocean strand.
One of the things which early attracted my attention in King Bô-gôô-gôô’s palace, was the hangings, apparently of the softest leather, worked in mosaic patterns of transcendent beauty.