"Had I made small notches! Listen,
Koogah, thou scratcher of bone! If I had made small notches neither the
stick, nor twenty sticks, could have borne them--nay, not all the
driftwood of all the beaches between this village and the next. And if
all of you, the women and children as well, were twenty times as many,
and if you had twenty hands each, and in each hand a stick and a knife,
still the notches could not be cut for the people I saw, so many were
they and so fast did they come and go."
"There cannot be so many people in all the world," Opee-Kwan objected,
for he was stunned and his mind could not grasp such magnitude of
numbers.
"What dost thou know of all the world and how large it is?" Nam-Bok
demanded.
"But there cannot be so many people in one place."
"Who art thou to say what can be and what cannot be?"
"It stands to reason there cannot be so many people in one place. Their
canoes would clutter the sea till there was no room. And they could
empty the sea each day of its fish, and they would not all be fed."
"So it would seem," Nam-Bok made final answer; "yet it was so. With my
own eyes I saw, and flung my stick away." He yawned heavily and rose to
his feet.
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