on the
cloth which she was wearing. Angered by these dirty habits Thakur Baba
deprived men of the benefits which he had conferred upon them and the
rice began to grow in a husk and the cotton plants only produced raw
cotton and men's skulls became fixed so that they could not be removed.

In those old days too the sky was quite close to the earth and Thakur
Baba used to come and visit men in their houses. So it was a saying
among our forefathers "Do, not throw your dirty leaf plates near the
front or back door and do not let your brass plates and dishes remain
unwashed at night; for if Thakur Baba come along and see them so, he
will not come into the house but will be angry and curse us." But one
day a woman after finishing her meal threw the used leaf plate out of
the door, and a gust of wind carried it up to the sky; this displeased
Thakur Baba and he resolved no longer to dwell in the neighbourhood of
men as they were so ill-mannered as to throw their dirty leaf plates
at him and so he lifted the sky to its present height above the earth.

To this day men who have heard of this scold those who throw their
refuse into the street and bid them heap it up in some out-of-the-way
place.

The misdeeds of men at length made Thakur Baba so angry that he
resolved to destroy them all. Now Thakur Baba is Sing Chando or
the Sun, and the Moon is his wife: and at first there were as many
stars by day as there are by night and they were all the children of
the Sun and Moon who had divided them between them. So Sing Chando
having resolved to destroy mankind blazed with a fierce heat till man
and beast writhed under the torture of it. But when the Moon looked
down and saw their sufferings she was filled with pity and thought
how desolate the earth would be without a living being on it. So she
hastened to Sing Chando and prayed him not to desolate the earth; but
for all her beseeching the utmost that she could obtain was a promise
from her Lord that he would spare one or two human beings to be the
seed of a future race. So Sing Chando chose out a young man and a young
woman and bade them go into a cave in a hill side and close the mouth
of the cave with a raw hide and when they were safely inside he rained
fire from heaven and killed every other living being on the earth.

Five days and five nights it rained fire and the man and woman in
the cave sang--(to the Baha tune)

"Five days and five nights the fire will rain, ho!