day it wondered what the difference was between Heaven and Hell, and because there was no one around to ask, it decided to find out for itself.
The young panda went to Hell first. It was like a gigantic café, full of round tables. At the tables were groups of pandas, snarling and screaming at each other across bowls of the most delicious bamboo shoots imaginable. In their paws they held chopsticks so long they found it impossible to feed themselves. Whenever they tried to pick up some food all they managed to do was poke each other in the eye. They were all starving and miserable.
Next the young panda visited Heaven to see what that place was like. It was surprised to see the same tables, and the same bowls of delicious bamboo shoots. These pandas also had very long chopsticks, but instead of looking miserable they were all smiling and licking their lips. They were having the most wonderful time imaginable, for instead of trying to feed themselves, which was impossible with such long chopsticks, they were feeding each other.
When it returned home the young panda decided Heaven and Hell looked pretty much the same, and that selfish pandas created their own Hell, and generous pandas created their own Heaven.
DIFFERENT CREATURES HAVE ENDED UP LIVING THE WAY they do because of something that’s happened in their past. The dove, for example, leads a comfortable enough life in a dove-cote, being fed seed and coming and going at will. Presumably this is because it was so helpful to Noah when he was on the Ark.
Other creatures didn’t have such good luck in the past. Take the owl, the mole, the frog and the moth. Once they had lived together in a large orchard and wanted for nothing. Then one night a traveller came asking for shelter, and they offered him the use of a silver tent they kept for guests down by the river. Now, this guest was rather special, for with him he carried a jar that contained the Elixir of Life – immortality itself.
Some say the stranger was an angel, others are not so sure. Whichever way it was, he was a restless sleeper and that night, without knowing it, he knocked his precious jar into the river, and immortality was lost forever.
In the morning everyone was horrified to find the jar gone. Not knowing it had been carried away by the river, they all set about searching for it. The owl searched amongst moss-quiet ruins and in gloomy woods. The mole burrowed under the earth. The frog looked down dank wells and under stones. The moth searched in cupboards, looking up the sleeves of suits and in the folds of dresses. It even searched for the Elixir of Life in flames. None of them ever found it. But they still live the same way today; they are still searching.
ONE PERFECTLY CLEAR NIGHT A YOUNG GLOW-WORM crawled from a crevice in the vineyard wall and saw the stars for the first time. Naturally, it mistook them for glow-worms like itself.
‘I never knew there were so many of us!’ it thought. It sat staring at the stars the whole night long and when dawn came and the stars vanished it thought itself the sole survivor.
Then the sun rose, and the glow-worm retreated back into its crevice and peered out in even greater astonishment, for it believed that the sun was an even bigger glow-worm. It concluded that of all living things, glow-worms were supreme.
A man who had been studying the glow-worm smiled to himself, thinking how deluded the little insect was. ‘But then, how can something so insignificant know that it is Man who is the supreme life-force on the planet?’ he thought.
He reached into the crevice to pick out the glow-worm and as he did so, he pricked his finger on a thorn. A fatal microbe entered the tiny wound and as it multiplied and went rushing towards his heart, it thought, ‘How deluded the man is, to think himself as powerful as a microbe!’
A MAN HEARD A RUMOUR THAT DEATH WAS COMING TO THE town in which he lived to search for a man called John. He was terrified that it might be him Death was after, for his name was John. Of course there were lots of men called John in the town, but he decided to take no chances. Within an hour of hearing the rumour he packed his bags and set off for a distant town, where he took up lodgings above a café in a small out-of-the-way street and changed his name to Paul.
The moment he’d settled in, he went down to the café and ordered food. He was hardly seated before Death came and sat at a table beside him.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be in a different town tonight?’ the man asked.
‘Yes,’ said Death, ‘but I’ve one more call to make here first.’
‘And who might you be looking for?’ asked the man.
‘For someone called Paul,’ said Death. ‘I believe he has just arrived here from another town.’
The children found the Giant’s last three stories impossibly sad. Instinctively, they understood the relevance of the stories to him, for they were all, in one way or other, about dying.
As the night progressed so the Giant’s preoccupation with the consequences of not finding the missing story grew. He tried his best to hide his fear from the children, not wanting to upset them. But it was not possible to conceal entirely the enormity of his plight. Resting on the arms of his chair, his great hands trembled slightly, the veins twitching as he tried to accommodate the pain that came and went, flashing on and off like the beacon of a lighthouse on the edge of a dark, unforgiving ocean.
Rani and Hasan had been sitting apart from Betts and Liam, whispering and occasionally looking over at the Giant, obviously discussing him. It was not the missing story that preoccupied them, but something else. Eventually, they came and stood beside his chair where, egged on by Hasan, Rani asked, ‘Are you a real giant?’
The Story Giant screwed up his face in a show of mock concentration and said, ‘Well now, Rani, let me think about it. I am over three feet taller than the tallest human being who has ever lived – does that make me a real giant?’
‘But in fairy-tales …’
‘In fairy-tales we are nasty pieces of work, aren’t we?’
‘You are much taller in fairy tales, though. At least as tall as a house.’
‘Or even taller,’ said Hasan. ‘I’ve seen pictures of giants as tall as office-blocks.’
‘The mistake about our size came about because people once took us for something else,’ said the Giant. ‘Many centuries ago, before people knew about dinosaurs they were puzzled by the huge bones they were constantly digging up. Because they knew countless legends and myths about giants they decided that the bones must be ours. And why not? At least they had heard about us. The bones were proof that we were indeed monstrously tall. Does that answer your question?’
‘You mean people actually thought dinosaur bones were giants’ bones?’ asked Hasan in disbelief.
The Giant nodded.
Rani was satisfied with the explanation of the Giant’s less than fairy-tale size, but Hasan wasn’t. He went off to search the library shelves for books on dinosaurs.
What
