The Czar And The Braggart
There was once a Czar who liked to spend his time listening to braggarts. But he would stipulate a condition: the boast had to be so effective that the Czar should be prompted to call his bluff, in which case the narrator could claim the gold coins kept in a tray. And if he failed to convince the Czar, that would mean the end of the narrator. And for that, the Czar kept a sword in another tray, and many a braggart had met their end at the hands of the cruel Czar. One day, an old farmer decided to try his luck. When he arrived at the palace, he was quite drunk and he announced in the court that he would be truthful and narrate only whatever had really happened. He was determined to claim the 'golden' reward. By the time he took his seat, the two trays were placed before the Czar, one containing the coins and the other the shining sword. The Czar and the courtiers eagerly waited for the old man to start his narration. "Yesterday, I was ploughing the field," he began slowly. "After some time, I found my horse dead tired. So, I let him free. Very strangely, he would jump forward and the next moment he would jump backward. This went on for a long time, and do you know what happened?" the farmer paused for a while, as he looked at the alert faces of the Czar and his courtiers.
"The horse was split into two parts, with the front half running back home, and the rear portion falling down in the field." "You're just bluffing!" shouted the courtiers. The Czar was not ready to agree with them. "The farmer is clever. He seems to be capable of many things," he said. Turning to the farmer, he asked, "Then, what did you do?" "Oh! I patted the back of the horse and made him run with me, and we caught up with the front half. I stuck the two halves with gum from the gum tree, tied the horse to the tree, and lay down and slept. When I woke up, I found the tree had grown so tall that it was touching the sky." The courtiers shouted, "It's all a lie! A tree so tall as to touch the sky? Impossible!" The Czar, was, however, enjoying the story. He cautioned his courtiers, "The farmer seems to be very clever. Let's not underestimate him." "You want to know what I did, then?" the farmer asked the Czar, ignoring the courtiers. "I climbed the tree and went up, up, up, till I reached heaven."
The courtiers thought of cornering him. "Heaven, did you say? You must have seen god. What was he doing there?" "God was playing cards with his disciples," said the farmer, casually. "Just as I play cards with you sometimes," added the Czar, trying to put his courtiers at ease. "Does God play cards? We don't believe him, sire!" said the courtiers, apologetically. "The farmer appears to be clever," interjected the Czar. "He's capable of many things. Let's listen to him." "I wandered in heaven for some time," the farmer continued his narration. "Then I remembered, I had not completed ploughing the field. So I had to come down to the earth. I couldn't find the gum tree that had grown up to heaven. Luckily, I found someone busy spinning. He spared for me a very long thread. I tied it to the sky and climbed down. Unfortunately, it was not long enough to get me to the earth. You know what I did? I cut a portion of the thread from the top and tied that bit at the end below." The courtiers could not accept any more of his story. "He's telling a lie!" they shouted. "Sire, when he cut the thread from the top, it would not have remained tied to the sky and he would have fallen down!" The Czar was not taken by their argument. "I'm sure the farmer is capable of all that. He's clever," the Czar supported the farmer.