The dangers of armour

The knight sat on his horse in plate armour.

Oh God, he said. I can't move.

Ho ho, said the horse, and ran away.

Stop!

Ho ho, said the horse, and stopped so suddenly that the knight fell off.

He lay on the ground alone. Wolves licked his armour until he rusted. Lizards laid eggs on him.

O help, said the knight.

Ages went by. Someone, he couldn't see who, built a house nearby and incorporated him into a rockery. He realised that death had forgotten where he was.

Ghblmf, he said, as agapanthus roots grew around his jaw.

When the home was featured in Better Homes & Gardens they photographed the owner leaning on a spade by the rockery, but, as he leaned, the blade of his instrument cut downwards through the earth and into the knight's leg.

Ayooingh!

The knight sat up.

What's that? asked the journalist from Better Homes & Gardens.

I don't know, said the owner.

Mackmngarkl! shouted the knight, stamping around heavily, soil and dandelions dropping off him. Shock had given him the strength to move. Rusty pieces of armour fell away from his chest and limbs. Jmeblblbl!

It's a knight!

Get out of my rockery!

No, leave him alone, said the journalist. We'll do a feature. O sir knight, listen to me --

Bwulnch!

Sir knight!

Prigah! The knight found his tongue. Agapanthus! he shouted. Agapanthus!

The roots had been around his mouth for so long that it was the only word he could say.

Agapanthus! Agapanthus!

The journalist wrote that down.

Islands

The Wodaabe man with a stripe painted down the centre of his face stood by his friend looking extraordinarily slender, elegant, and smooth.

At the same moment a tortoise stood on a rock in the Galapagos Islands looking extraordinarily squat, blunt, and knobbly.

Nature, sensing that the co-existence of extreme opposites created something like a vacuum of meaning, sent a vision of the Wodaabe to the tortoise, and a vision of the tortoise to the Wodaabe. But the tortoise had never seen a Wodaabe before, and the Wodaabe had never seen a Galapagos tortoise, so each one saw the other translated into a physical language they could understand. The tortoise saw a tall, thin female tortoise with a stripe marked on her beak, and the Wodaabe man saw a warty Wodaabe woman under a basket. They spent the rest of their lives searching for this being, which, they felt, was the only thing that would make them whole.

Proof

"Moa are easy to kill," boasted the Maori warrior. "I smacked one on the head and it died."

"That's nothing. I smacked one on the head and the one next to it died."

"Ha! I just have to look at them and they die."

"They do not."

"They do so."

He proved it.

"Well fiddle dee dee!"

Birds and fish

People in the Amazon jungle ate fish from the river and birds from the tree. In other rivers birds swam; in other trees fish flew. But no one would touch them.

The Aztecs dancing.

The Aztecs could cut off a person's head and turn it into a ball. They made footballs, tennis balls, golf balls, every kind of ball you can imagine. Their cities were filled with balls. Balls bounced up and down the ziggurats. The people learnt to avoid falling over by jumping and skipping. It was a very beautiful and rhythmic time, the cities full of coloured balls and the people dancing among them.

The Spanish conquered them easily.