Note 20 — Chapter VI · THE INTERPRETATION OF ANDAMANESE CUSTOMS AND BELIEFS: MYTHS AND LEGENDS

In a number of these legends it is stated that the ancestors saved themselves by climbing up into a tall tree or into the trees. This is to be explained by the fact that the birds all live up in the trees, and a great many of them can never be seen save overhead. The top of the forest is where the birds live, it is their world, raised above the world of men and women. The flood drove the inhabitants up to the tops of the trees. The birds remained there and only the human beings came down again. As the original inhabitants were driven up into the trees by water covering the land we may complete the myth by saying that those who failed to reach the upper world were on that account compelled to spend the rest of their existence in the water as fish and turtle. This is, I think, what the legend really means. Thus the story of the flood gives a picture of a threefold world, the waters below with their inhabitants the fishes and turtle and other marine creatures, the solid earth, and the upper region of the top of the forest where the flowers bloom and the butterflies and other insects and the birds pass their lives. This representation of the top of the forest as a world in itself may seem strange to one who has never seen a tropical forest, but to one who has spent months beneath it the forest-top of the Andamans does seem a world in itself, near yet inaccessible, a world where there is a gay and interesting life in the sunshine above, of which the wanderer in the deep shade beneath can only catch occasional glimpses as he gazes up through the tangle of boughs and leaves. For the natives of the islands therefore the top of the forest is an alien world into which they can only penetrate with extreme difficulty, by climbing, and with the life of which they have little to do. Similarly the waters of the sea are another world into which they can only penetrate for a few moments at a time by diving20.