Leonardo’s Mountain Of Clams And The Diet Of Worms (1999) - Plot & Excerpts
“In the beginning of years,” Rudyard Kipling tells us in his Just-So Stories, “when the world was so new and all, and the animals were just beginning to work for Man, there was a camel, and he lived in the middle of a Howling Desert because he did not want to work.” Instead, when urged to service by the horse, dog, and ox, the recalcitrant camel merely snorted, “Humph.” So the most powerful of resident Djinns, converting utterance to substance, put a hump on the camel’s back to make up for three lost days of work at the beginning of time: “‘That’s made a-purpose,’ said the Djinn, ‘all because you missed those three days. You will be able to work now for three days without eating, because you can live on your humph.’” Kipling ripped off the camel to preach a sermon for children about old-fashioned virtues of work, and the perils of idleness—for his accompanying poem abandons the charm of the tale itself for a heavy moral disquisition couched in doggerel: The Camel’s hump is an ugly lump Which well you may see at the Zoo; But uglier yet is the hump we get from having too little to do.
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