Ojje-ben-Onogh was five thousand years old. He stood a mile high. His footprints made lakes; his sneezes made sandstorms. He fished in the sea and cooked his catch by holding it towards the sun.
When his cornfield sucked up all the earth's water, the people begged Moses to stop him.
Ojje-ben-Onogh saw Moses coming and lifted up a mountain to throw at him.
Just then a bird flying overhead dropped a piece of straw on the mountain. The weight exceeded Ojje-ben-Onogh's strength. He let go, and the mountain crushed him.
"Thank you," Moses told the bird. "You saved the world!"
Inspired by: "Moses and Ojje Ben Onogh" in The Crest and the Hide by Harold Courlander, 1982.
Notes: You can read the original story online. In the original story, Moses kills Ojje-ben-Onogh by leaping thirty yards into the air and hitting him with his staff on the snakle, but to shorten the story I changed it to the mountain being the end of the story. Courlander heard this story in Somalia from Mosa Mohammed. The story has more elaborate exaggerations. This is a popular folktale in the Islamic tradition; see Wikipedia.
No comments:
Post a Comment