Note 21 — Chapter VI · THE INTERPRETATION OF ANDAMANESE CUSTOMS AND BELIEFS: MYTHS AND LEGENDS

It may be said that, on this view, no allowance is made for the existence of terrestrial animals. That is true, but it must be remembered that there are very few such animals in the Andamans. The civet-cat and the monitor lizard and some of the snakes are as much arboreal in their habits as they are terrestrial. There remain only the pig and the rat as true terrestrial animals, and it may be noted that neither of these two animals ever figures in the legends as an ancestor. There are independent legends that relate to the origin of the pig, and the rat seems to be of so little importance that no explanation of its origin would seem to be necessary. Moreover the monitor lizard and the civet-cat, which are partly terrestrial, occupy for this reason exceptional positions in the legends. Thus there is a legend recorded from the Aka-Kede tribe which accounts for the simultaneous origin of the civet-cat and the pigs through a game of the ancestors21. The monitor lizard is in an altogether exceptional position in that it is equally at home in the trees, on the ground and in the water of a creek. It is in a way free of all the three divisions of the world. This helps us to understand why in some of the tribes the monitor lizard is regarded as the original ancestor not only of the Andamanese but also of all the animals, including the birds of the forest and the fishes of the sea. The civet-cat cannot live in the water as the lizard can22, but can climb trees and run on the ground. In many of the legends the civet-cat is said to be the wife of the monitor lizard. It will be remembered that in the Akar-Bale story it is the civet-cat, the wife of the first ancestor (the monitor lizard), who saved the fire from the flood by climbing up to the top of a steep hill with it. Thus it may be seen that the position of the monitor lizard and the civet-cat in the legends of the Andamanese is partly determined by the position that these two animals occupy in relation to the threefold division of the world revealed in the story of the flood.