Salamander
The salamander felt sad.
He had tried to leave the cave that was his home, but his head
stuck in the entrance and prevented him from doing so. The cave
that was now his eternal home had, as this will suggest, an ex-
tremely small entrance. It was gloomy, too. When he tried to force
his way out, his head only succeeded in blocking the entrance
like a cork, a fact which, though an undoubted testimony to the
way his body had grown over a period of two years, was enough
to plunge him into alarm and despondency.
“What a fool I’ve been!’” he exclaimed.
He tried swimming about the inside of the cave as freely as it
would allow him. When people are distressed, they frequently
pace about their rooms in just this fashion. Unfortunately, the
salamander’s home was none too large for pacing about in.
All he could manage, in fact, was to move his body somewhat
to and fro and from side to side. This had the effect of covering the
walls of the cave with slime and making them feel smooth, so that
he was convinced in the end that moss had grown on his own back
and tail and belly. He heaved a great sigh. Then he muttered, as
though he had reached a great decision:
“All right—if I can’t get out, then I have an idea of my own!”
But it scarcely needs saying that he had not a single idea of any
use.
59The ceiling of the cave was thickly overgrown with hair moss
and liverwort. The scales of the liverwort wandered all over the
rock, and the hair moss had dainty flowers on the ends of its very
slender, scarlet carpophores. The dainty flowers formed dainty
fruit which, in accordance with the law of propagation among
cryptogams, shortly began to scatter pollen.
The salamander was not fond of looking at the hair moss and
the liverwort. Indeed, he felt a positive distaste for them, for the
pollen from the moss scattered steadily over the surface of the water
in the cave, and he was convinced that the water of his home
would eventually be polluted. What was worse, there was a clump
of mold in each of the hollows in the rocks and the ceiling. How
stupid the mold was in its habits! It was forever disappearing and
growing again as though it lacked the will to continue propagat-
ing itself unequivocally. The salamander liked to put his face at
the entrance and watch the scene outside the cave. To peer out at
a bright place from inside somewhere dim—is this not a fascinating
occupation? Never does one so constantly see so many different
things as when peering from a small window.
Mountain streams, it seems, are given to rushing along in a
great froth and flurry only to form large, still backwaters at un-
expected places. From the entrance of his cave, the salamander
could look out on just such a backwater of the stream. There, a
clump of duckweed on the riverbed grew in cheerful array, stretch-
ing from the bottom to the surface in countless, slender, perfectly
straight stalks. Then, when it reached the surface, it suddenly
ceased its growth and poked duckweed blossom up from the water
into the air. Large numbers of killifish seemed to enjoy swimming
in and out between the stalks of the duckweed, for there was a
shoal of them in the forest of stalks, all trying their hardest not to
be carried away by the current. The whole shoal would veer to the
right, then to the left. Whenever one of them veered to the left by
mistake, the majority, of one accord, also veered to the left for fear
of being left behind. Should one of them be forced by a stalk to
veer to the right, all the other little fish without exception veered
60to the right in his wake. It was, therefore, extremely difficult for
any one of them to make off by himself and leave.
Watching the little fish, the salamander could not help sneering
at them.
“What a lot of excessively hidebound fellows,” he thought.
The surface of the pool moved ceaselessly in a sluggish whirl-
pool. One could tell this from a single white petal that had fallen
into the water. On the surface, the white petal described a wide
circle that gradually shrank in size. It increased its speed. In the
end, it was describing an extremely small circle until, at the very
center of the circle, the petal itself was swallowed up by the water.
“Tt almost made me giddy,” muttered the salamander.
One evening, a tiny shrimp came wandering into the cave. The
small creature, which seemed to be in the middle of its spawning
season and had a transparent belly filled with what looked like
tiny millet seeds, attached itself to the wall of the cave. For a while,
it merely waved its tentacles, which were so long and fine that
they disappeared before one could trace them to their end; then
suddenly, for no apparent reason, it jumped off the wall, ventured
on two or three successful somersaults in midair, and ended up
clinging to the salamander’s flank.
The salamander felt an urge to look round and see what the
shrimp was doing there, but resisted it. If he moved his body even
slightly, the small creature would certainly have fled in alarm.
What, he wondered, could this pregnant creature, this worthless
scrap of life, be up to in this place?
The shrimp must be laying its eggs, under the impression that
the salamander’s flank was a rock. Or perhaps it was busy medi-
tating on something.
“People who worry about things and get wrapped up in their
own thoughts are stupid,” remarked the salamander smugly.
He resolved that, whatever happened, he must get out of the
cave. Nothing could be so foolish as to remain forever sunk in
thought. This was no time for frivolity.
61