Читать книгу The Story Giant - Brian Patten - Страница 13

ONE PERFECTLY CLEAR NIGHT A YOUNG GLOW-WORM crawled from a crevice in the vineyard wall and saw the stars for the first time. Naturally, it mistook them for glow-worms like itself.

‘I never knew there were so many of us!’ it thought. It sat staring at the stars the whole night long and when dawn came and the stars vanished it thought itself the sole survivor.

Then the sun rose, and the glow-worm retreated back into its crevice and peered out in even greater astonishment, for it believed that the sun was an even bigger glow-worm. It concluded that of all living things, glow-worms were supreme.

A man who had been studying the glow-worm smiled to himself, thinking how deluded the little insect was. ‘But then, how can something so insignificant know that it is Man who is the supreme life-force on the planet?’ he thought.

He reached into the crevice to pick out the glow-worm and as he did so, he pricked his finger on a thorn. A fatal microbe entered the tiny wound and as it multiplied and went rushing towards his heart, it thought, ‘How deluded the man is, to think himself as powerful as a microbe!’