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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[ SEPTEMBER, 1921
Now there was hanging down a creeper called tö-a-nqu-ö, 26 and they tried to ascend to the skies by it ; but it began to break.
Come, let us try to ascend by the cobweb." said " Industrious." "Shall we not fare still worse, if as soon as we tread on it, it should snap," said öpêt-ngen.
"In any case let us try," the other one replied.
So Tö-kēn ("Industrious ") went up first, and then her sister followed her : and thecobweb did not break.
When they had already got a good distance up, they suddenly remembered that they had forgotten their little basket (made of ra-foh, the spathe of the betel nut); and Tö-ken sent her younger sister to fetch it.
However, she ran across her mother in the house, and was at once stopped. The mother then told Va-mi-rô to keep watch over Tö-pet-ngen, whilst she herself went in search of Tökěn.
She found her on the cobweb, not far from the ground, for she was waiting for To-pêt ngen, and had come down some distance to meet her.
The mother caught hold of To-ken by the foot, and tugged at it, but she held on fast to the cobweb, and by dint of vigorous kicking, she managed to get free from her mother's grip.
Tö-kěn's ankle was twisted out of its socket by reason of her mother tugging so at it; and she only accomplished the ascent to the moon by dint of painful perseverance.
But she thought no more of the pain, for she had got up to the face of the moon and was now far away from her insulting and unjust mother.
There she lay down on the surface of the moon and slept, having her box for her pillow. Her ankle remained out of joint, and Tö-pêt-ngen much missed her, for she was still in the clutches of their insulting mother.
XI.- CURSES LIKE HENS, COME HOME TO ROOST.”
(More literally, "The Arrow ricochets and strikes the Archer.") Once upon a time, long long ago, the people of Chowra came to this island with a canoe for sale, which was purchased by the people of Nök-töl-tui.27 In exchange for the boat, the people of Chowra got a great quantity of goods-spoons, silver-wire, axes, and dahe (choppers).28 But they cheated the people of Chowra by shaping pieces of wood to look like dahs, and then daubing them over with soot.
The Chowra people did not in the least perceive how they were being deceived ; and they took their things and went home. There, at last, they discovered how they had been befooled; perhaps it was through accidentally finding out how very light the dahs were.
Now the people of Chowra are wondrous magicians. So they made a ball of pandanus (or bread-fruit) paste, and a small canoe to contain it. Then they sent off this toy canoe with the pandanus paste a board it, and it went straight to the village of those people who had deceived them; and it was cast up on the beach there. 20 T8-8-ngu-ö, s.e., "bitter," from its taste.
A former village on the south coast of Car Nicobar. 23 [See my Beginning of Currency, ante, vol. XXIX, pp. 32-33, for the value of a racing canoe in
nute and other articles at Car Nicobar in 1896. The interest in the Nicobarese practice of exchange between islande lies in the fact that a racing camoe is first valued in a large number of COCOAnuts, but the payment is actually made in a number of articles each separately valued in cocoanuts, the sum of which amounts to the value of the canoe in coconuts. In modern European international trade the same idea is exactly represented by the difference in exchange between two countries.-R.C.T.)
