The fourth destruction

The annal counts the ages by their endings. The first sun eaten by jaguars; the second carried off by wind; the third burned; the fourth, called 4-Water, drowned. The present world is entered as the fifth, and dated. Between the fourth ending and the fifth beginning the leaf keeps a smaller record.

“Before the water came, the man Tata and the woman Nene were told: hollow out a great log, and enter it, and when the water rises eat one ear of maize, you the one, and you the other, and no more. The water rose to the sky and they were kept in the log. When it fell they came out, and they saw a fish, and they took it, and they drew fire with the fire-drill, and they cooked the fish and ate. The smoke reached the sky, and it was seen, and it was said: who has made a fire, who has smoked the sky? And for the ear they did not keep, they were changed, and were dogs.”

The instruction is a ration: one ear each, no more, for the duration of the water. The catastrophe the story actually turns on is not the flood — the flood they survive exactly as told — but the meal after it, the fish and the unpermitted fire, the smoke that is seen and answered from above. They kept the vessel. They did not keep the ration.

Four endings, each total, each followed by a beginning under new terms. No tradition that counts its own destructions this precisely expects to have counted the last one. The log is the same vessel as the ark and the boat and the enclosure; the single ear of maize is the same rule as the one jar, the one measure, the one line that may not be crossed. Transcription confidence: 88%.