The spirits were very angry because they did not cheerfully agree to pay the money, and answered, “If you will not buy these mortars which we have brought for your use, you shall carry them up to our home on the top of the mountain, for the labor of bringing them down has wearied us.”
Not daring to incur the wrath of the spirits, and yet being utterly unable to carry the huge mortars to the high mountain, they paid the price, for, they reasoned, “Is any price too great to risk our falling under the displeasure of the evil spirits?”
The spirits departed with the money, and to this day, the stone mortars are scattered about the streets of that city, and, when strangers ask why they are there and what use is made of them, this story will be told, and all people say it is verily the truth, for do you not see them with your eyes, and how else could they have come here, had not the spirits brought them?
II
Fables From the Forest
Right and Might
While a deer was eating wild fruit, he heard an owl call, “Haak, haak,”[6] and a cricket cry, “Wat,”[7] and, frightened, he fled.
In his flight he ran through the trees up into the mountains and into streams. In one of the streams the deer stepped upon a small fish and crushed it almost to death.
Then the fish complained to the court, and the deer, owl, cricket and fish had a lawsuit. In the trial came out this evidence:
As the deer fled, he ran into some dry grass, and the seed fell into the eye of a wild chicken, and the pain of the seed in the eye of the chicken caused it to fly up against a nest of red ants. Alarmed, the red ants flew out to do battle, and in their haste, bit a mon-goose. The mon-goose ran into a vine of wild fruit and shook several pieces of it on the head of a hermit, who sat thinking under a tree.