ultimate Friend!
But the evil star of self-righteousness,
Was emerging from yonder horizon
And man’s undoing was nigh.
Once in a shady recess of a vine-screened cave
A beautiful woman whom some call Nelesi,
But whom many more call Kei-Lei-Si,
Gave birth to the first deformed child;
Deformed not in flesh alone, but also in his soul.
His shrunken body supported a big flat head
Containing one short-sighted cyclopian eye.
His arms and his legs were shrunken stiff
And were twisted like a sun-dried impala,
While his mouth was completely displaced to one side
In a perpetual obscene leer.
His scrawny neck was wrinkled,
Like a starved old vulture two days dead,
And his round little paunch protruded ’neath his chest
In a most revolting way.
Strings of crystallised saliva drooled
Continuously from his sagging lips;
He breathed through only one nostril
With a sickening hissing sound.
The name of this very unpleasant monstrosity—
Tribal Narrators tell today—
Was Zaralleli or Zah-Ha-Rrellel, The Wicked!
This was the man – no, rather the Thing
That introduced all evil to this earth.
Whenever a child was born to these First Men
The mother would take it straight for a blessing
To the two-headed talking Kaa-U-La birds,
And also to ask them to give it a name.
Thus it came about that when Nelesi
(Let us rather abide by Kei-Lei-Si, for this is
Her proper and uncorrupted name)
Took her terrible offspring to the big old Kaa-U-La bird,
Which nested not far from her cave,
It gave one glance at her
And shuddered at what she carried!
In the half-dead deformed thing that the girl held aloft
The Kaa-U-La bird could see Evil so great
And so utterly monstrous that if unchecked
There and then it would def’nitely overrun
The Universe outright with its bad influence.
And what it saw beyond the veil of tomorrow
Made it screech with unrestrained horror and pain:
‘Kaaaaaauk! Oh woman, what have you there!
Destroy it, kill it, without delay!’
‘What, but this is my baby, my child!’
Cried the mother in utter despair.
But the bird’s voice rang like metal
And echoed o’er valleys and mountains;
‘Female of the human race – I appeal to thee,
Destroy thy offspring before it’s too late!’
‘But where have you ever seen mothers kill babies?’
The poor mother pleaded, now on her knees.
‘For the sake of Mankind, and that of the stars,
And for all those as yet unborn,
I command thee oh female of thy race,
Destroy that thing in your arms!
No baby is that which you’re holding there,
But Naked Evil, devouring and pure—
A Bloody Future it spells for the Human Race!’
‘My baby evil? He is the dearest baby on earth!
My loveliest baby – destroy it? Not on your life!’
‘I command thee . . .’ But Kei-Lei-Si screamed;
She turned and ran like a buck through the bush
Her baby clutching her heaving breasts.
The Kaa-U-La immediately took off in pursuit
By telepathy calling all others to join
In the hunt for the fugitive girl.
Only once she paused for a gasp of breath
On the grassy slope of a hill,
And on looking around she saw a black flock—
Hordes of the two-headed, six-winged rainbow birds.
It struck her that these birds rarely flew,
And did so only when the need was great.
‘Aieeee! My baby, they seek you—
But they will not get you as long as I live!’
And with this she turned and sped up the hill;
But as she descended the other side
The great birds were on her and diving at her
Ripping with talons deep furrows on her back.
She reached the dark depths of the forest anon
And the birds in their tireless pursuit
Uprooted trees and moved the rocks
And dived with a roar of air.
Again and again they appealed to her
