Scorpion Soup Read Online Free PDF

of the fisherman’s home.
    News of the farmer’s bravery spread.
    The corpses were taken into the town’s main square, where they were hung up for all to see. A passer-by recognised them as the most feared bandits in the realm, with a handsome reward on their heads.
    Before he knew it, the farmer was being received in the royal palace, where he was decorated by the king, and rewarded with six bags of gold. Hardly able to believe his luck, he bought an ornate carriage and fine clothes for himself.
    Then he set off back to his village to be reunited with his wife.
    Unaccustomed to luxury of any kind, the farmer ordered the coach driver to pull up at dusk on the banks of a brook. He selected a spot beneath a sprawling neem tree, protected from the wind by an outcrop of rocks.
    ‘We will camp here for the night,’ he said, ‘and set off at dawn.’
    The moon full above him, the farmer found himself unable to sleep. And, eventually, his mind turned to the little bottles he had left.
    Opening his sackcloth bag, he removed the remaining bottles and held them up to the moon for light. But his water bottle had leaked some of its precious fluid and the writing on the labels had been smudged.
    As much as he squinted, he was unable to read a word.
    ‘I should open them all and release their contents into the air,’ he thought aloud, ‘after all, they could contain harmful elements.’
    But something niggled at him and, before he could reason with himself, he had snatched one of the bottles out, pulled away the stopper, and drunk down its contents.
    A few minutes passed and the farmer began to sense something. He could hear a distant sound, like the clatter of hooves galloping far away. He looked to the right, then the left, and realised that the sound was coming from the base of the neem tree.
    He leant down, cupped a hand to his ear.
    A procession of ants was marching across a root, exposed above the surface of the ground. The farmer watched as they made their way across a stretch of barren land beside the brook, and down a hole no wider than his thumb.
    The bizarre thing was that he could hear them walking, and talking as well, and he could understand exactly what they said. He could hear the sound of fish, too, swimming through the nearby water, and a nest of magpies up in the highest branches of the tree.
    But that was not all.
    The farmer walked over to the coachman, who was asleep on the grass. Without quite knowing how, he knew that the man had an eye condition that would very soon make him blind. And he knew that the carriage he drove was stolen, the yellow lacquer having been painted over the red livery of the king.
    With his heightened perception, the farmer felt truly alive, for the first time. He thought of all the possibilities, all the things he could do with such a gift.
    But then something caught his attention.
    The ants.
    He overheard one complaining to another.
    ‘What a nuisance it is that we have to dig this mine shaft,’ said the first.
    ‘And that there are these great big yellow blocks of metal hindering our way,’ said the other.
    ‘If only someone would move them for us,’ the first replied.
    Wasting no time, the farmer started digging.
    Within an hour he had unearthed forty bars of gold, the pure metal glinting in the moon’s light.
    ‘I’m rich!’ he exclaimed, ‘richer than in my wildest dreams!’
    The coachman was woken by the farmer’s outcry. He sat upright, rubbed his eyes, and screamed.
    ‘I’m blind! I can’t see a thing!’
    Loading the treasure into the carriage, the farmer helped the old coachman aboard as well. Then, fearing that the people of his own town would recognise him as the impoverished farmer that he was, he rode on and on until he came to the next kingdom.
    Once there, he rented a fine mansion for himself, found wealthy new friends, and set himself up as a member of the landed gentry.
    As the weeks slipped away, and as his funds were invested, the farmer became the