a fable uncle remus mother told him long ago

This is Mr Lincoln Augustus, first second cousin of Holymagiman

We had rather a quiet day of fishing today, not much happened and we caught but one fish, late in the day.

And to while away the time, we talked about this and that and everything else, and that set old Uncle Remus off on one of his remembrance trips, and he told us this little fable which he had apparently heard from his mother, and which he swears has been handed down from generation to generation right back from the time his ancestors lived in a village in Babylon.

And this was the tale he told, to while away the time till those lazy fish decided to bite:

Fable that Uncle Remus' mother told him, with the disclaimer that this story has been handed down from generation to generation and the story has therefore been subjected to embellishments of every type possible by everybody, depending on the storyteller and the state of mind she was in when telling the story. It has been established that three camels did wander the desert at that time, and it has been established that there was very bright star in the sky lighting the night, but nobody has been able to verify how the big hairy monster managed to creep into the temple when everything was so brightly lit by that star, but anyway, this is just a fable...we think.

"Long long ago there was a happy band of pygmy arrow people who scrabbled around and hunted food with their poison arrows and so got fatter and fatter, as time went by.

"Then one day a big yellow giant came walking along and saw all these fat little pygmy people and their remarkable arrows.

"And as the big yellow giant looked down at them, he noticed that his tummy was not quite as baggy and saggy as any self respecting giant's tummy should be. "Hmm," he thought to himself, "I'll have to do something about this right away, but what can I do?"

"And then he saw that the fat little pygmies were having the time of their lives catching pigs and ducks and donkeys and jackasses and mermaids and all other such edible delicacies with their arrows.

"So the big yellow giant bought up all the fat little pygmies' arrows because he saw that they were very good arrows for making people fat, and while the giant was very gigantic, he thought that he too could put on a bit of extra weight, and become even fatter and bigger than he already was, with a nice fat tummy to boot.

"So the big chiefs of the pygmy arrow family decided that they had better let go of all their arrows, as the big yellow giant was very big and very very scary and as he was also offering them lots of golden goodzooks, and now, since they did not have any arrows left, they thought that they had better go and get some darts because they still wanted to be in charge of something or other and being in charge of the pygmy dart people seemed to offer a good second chance in life to them.

"And perhaps the arrow leaders felt that they could make the pygmy dart people fatter with their little darts before the darts too got gobbled up by another marauding giant who may just happen to come along.


"At the same time, as the story goes, and we cannot vouch for its accuracy, in another place far far away, in Jerusalem to be exact, other strange happenings were happening. These strange happenings were the fact that three very strange Chinese people with pointy beards, called Fuk, Luk and Sau were seen riding around on three camels(one camel each) asking people if they had seen a rising star in the Eastern sky or heard of any new born babies, and one of the cameleers was heard asking the way to Bethlehem, which was six miles away.

And a star had suddenly appeared, and the three wise Chinamen, for they were truly wise, had set off after it, heading away away from Jeusalem towards Bethlehem, talking loudly in Chinese and singing what appeared to be a Chinese Opera in two parts. And out of the shadows came their choir, stepping in and out of the light from the Eastern Star that lit the sky brightly, and there were Dutchmen and Britishers and some very drunk South Australians, and even some very well educated people from the Peninsula of Malaya in that choir, with each singing louder and louder in the hope that their voices would be heard above the others.

"This troubled the high priests of the Star Temple of the East no end, because they too had seen strange visions in the depths of their eternal flames and so they had a vague inkling of what was to come.

"The high priests of the Star Temple in the East were even more troubled the next day when they found out that while they were being troubled the previous day and not paying too much attention to the comings and goings on in the Star Temple of the East, a great big hairy monster had come uninvited and most surreptitiously and had taken up residence in the attic of the Temple.

"The high priests were now very worried that they would be displaced from their comfortable lodgings if the big hairy monster ever decided to come down from the attic and take over the whole Temple, and so they decided to cast their eyes around for another temple that they could go and reside in, if such an eventuality occurred.

"And, if it must be said, it was a very quiet monster that resided in the attic, and it made nary a sound, though the high priests knew that it was always peering down at them with one of its three beady little eyes, through the cracks in the attic floorboards, watching their every move hither and thither among the precious golden idols that adorned the temple, some bedecked in diamonds, some in sapphires, and others in rubies and other such precious stones..

"And it was a fact, everyone knew, that the big hairy monster had a lot of money that he had amassed in his own lumbering way, and it was widely rumoured that the monster would give the priests a lot of shekels of gold for their temple and its precious idols when it finally came down to chase them away....unless another bigger, hairier monster with lots of armpit hair came along and chased them, and the big hairy monster upstairs and everybody else away with its big bad breath.

"But if their Temple was gone, where else could the high priests find a place to sacrifice young virgins and old goats and assorted jackasses that they may come across to the Gods of the Night when the moon was full? This was most troubling, and the priests did not know what to do.

"So the high priests looked around and remembered that they still owned a part of the little shrine that they had sold off before, Over in Palestine. This little shrine did not have idols bedecked in gold and precious stones, but still, there were some idols in the shrine whose merits had yet to be realised by their worshippers.

"The Star Temple in the East in Jerusalem still owned a part of that little shrine Over in Palestine so the high priests decided to hatch a devious little plan so that if the big hairy monster did eventually come down from the attic to occupy all the downstairs of the Star Temple in the East, the monster would find that the Star Temple in the East did not own as much of the little shrine Over in Palestine as it once did. And it would appear that the high priests hoped that they could move over to the shrine and build it up to a temple by and by, just like the new leaders of the dart pygmies.

"So a cunning plot was plotted wherein the praying hours of all the faithful worshippers in the little shrine Over in Palestine would be diluted by getting rid of the resident priests in the shrine and bringing in new priests who had Axes to grind and who were beholden to the high priests of the Star Temple in the East.

And so, the high priests felt confident that they would be able to move into the little shrine Over in Palestine if ever their hold on the Star Temple in the East was ever to go, or thats how the story goes.

And while all this was going on, the high priests noted that even more Chinese had come from the East and into the North, following in the camel tracks of Fuk, Luk and Sau, and so the Chinese opera got louder and louder than ever before. And many strange things were happening and the Eastern Star glowed brightly over the flat fertile plains.

But when the worshippers Over in Palestine heard about it, a great stink was raised, so much so that Marcellus was overheard to say to Horatio that "Something is rotten in the State of Denmark, but that unassailable stink that emanates from Over in Palestine that so assails my tender nostrils with such an overpowering pungence is something else altogether.

"So the people of Judea led a massive revolt with lots of screaming and hollering and writing of writs and soon a great wall was built to stop the Axe to grind people coming to the little shrine and grinding their axes on the idols; and the wall was well built and tall and sturdy and so the sham priests with axes to grind were held away for the time being , resulting in the best laid plans of mice and men (for we forgot to tell you that the three blind mice were also consulted, but their advice was of a most dubious quality as they spent more of their time running after the farmers wife, who promptly cut off their tails (if you know what that means) with a carving knife) coming to nought.

"But the high priests in the Star Temple in the East were well aware that the big hairy monster was watching their every move, now with this eye, then with the other, and later with a third, and they lived in fear that one day he would come down most unexpectedly and have them all for breakfast.

"And so the story goes, that the high priests in the Star Temple in the East spent many a night in the voluminous courtyard of the Star Temple in the East, bathed in the flickering light of a candle under the waning moon, plotting and planning their next moves over a chessboard of intrigue, waiting for the day the big hairy monster would finally come down from the attic with its big bagful of shekels and frightens everybody by saying "Yo Yo Boo Boo" in the middle of the night.

"And so, for the moment, the innocent God-fearing worshippers were able to continue worshipping their little idols at the shrine Over in Palestine while the high priests watched over their golden idols with the precious stones and waited for the day when the monster in the attic would finally decide to come down......

And then, one day, it happened, and they heard the big hairy monster opening the attic door....

And just after that they heard a loud thumping on the door as another hairy horrible monster peered in, and the high priests did quake for they knew that their time in this temple of the east was fast running out.

" And so what happened was that..."

But it was just at this very point that Holymagiman felt the most enormous tug on his rod, and by the time that fish was fought and landed in the boat, Uncle Remus never got to finish his little tale that his mother had told him.

But it was a most uninteresting tale, with absolutely no relevance to anyone or anything or fishing or even ordinary day to day living, so I guess it was just another old wifes tale that gets told when there is nothing else to tell and when the fish are not biting.

And I must leave you now for Holymagiman has just seen the American Embassy car draw up with the cool black dude sitting in the back seat with a big envelope, and so we have to go.

Blessings of the Lord
MLA