by Henry M. Stanley · 1893
Fantasy · Classics
Stories told round the camp fire to the explorer Henry Morton Stanley by the African men who travelled with him, written up for young readers, together with portraits of the storytellers.
Content note: Written in 1893 from the viewpoint of a European explorer, with the attitudes and terms of its time. Some stories have violence.
The Creation of Man.
In the old, old time, all this land, and indeed all the whole earth was covered with sweet water.
But the water dried up or disappeared somewhere, and the grasses, herbs, and plants began to spring up above the ground, and some grew, in the course of many moons, into trees, great and small, and the water was confined into streams and rivers, pools and lakes, and as the rain fell it kept the streams and rivers running, and the pools and lakes always fresh. There was no living thing moving upon the earth, until one day there sat by one of the pools a large Toad. How long he had lived, or how he came to exist, is not known; it is suspected, however, that the water brought him forth out of some virtue that was in it. In the sky there was only the Moon glowing and shining—on the earth there was but this one Toad. It is said that they met and conversed together, and that one day the Moon said to him:
“I have an idea. I propose to make a man and a woman to live on the fruits of the earth, for I believe that there is rich abundance of food on it fit for such creatures.”
