In the beginning - Africa When the Creator made the Earth he commanded a great snake to gather the material together with his huge coils. This gave the Earth its shape, so that people and all manner of birds and beasts could live upon it. This Ancient Snake erected four pillars: North, South, East and West and his coils keep the pillars upright. These pillars hold up the heavens. The Ancient Snake has skins of black, white and red that he puts on for night, daylight and twilight. In the beginning, the ancient snake found only stagnant water on earth, so he shaped out courses for the streams and channels for the rivers and thus the world received life. And when Ancient Snake carried the Creator through the new world, mountains appeared wherever they stopped. When the Creator finished his work, he saw there were too many mountains, trees and large animals for the earth to carry alone. So he asked Ancient Snake to coil himself up and hold his tail in his mouth and so support the earth. The Creator then told Red Colobus Monkey to feed Ancient Snake whenever he got hungry. Today, the Ancient Snake still sustains the earth. But every so often, Ancient Snake shifts his position to relieve and ache or an itch and in doing so creates earthquakes. Should Red Colobus Monkey ever fail to feed Ancient Snake, the snake's hunger would force him to eat his own tail. If this ever happens, the earth will slide into the ocean and that will be the end of our world. (From tribe of Dahomey in Central Africa) >From the book , When lion could fly :and other tales from Africa told by Nick Greaves ; illustrated by Rod Clement. Publisher Hauppauge, N.Y. :Barron’s,1993