The Dragon'S Tale by Edi Holley

Author:Edi Holley [Holley, Edi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781532051616
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2018-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

THE SECRET OF SILK

In the spring my mother said she had a surprise for me.

“Go look in the top drawer of your bureau” she said. I couldn’t wait to find out what it was. I rushed upstairs and opened my bureau drawer. There was a plain white card with black dots on it. How disappointing. I looked again. The dots were tiny seeds.

“They are eggs…from a silk worm moth” she said. “If you keep them warm they will hatch. Do you know the story of silk? how it was the most precious thing the Chinese had. They didn’t want anyone else to discover the secret”

“Tell me, tell me,” I said.

First I discovered how to take care of silk worms. The tiny seeds soon morphed into small ugly crawling caterpillars. They were ravenous and never stopped munching mulberry leaves. In factories where silk is made, a roomful of munching worms sounds like heavy rain falling on a roof. We had a mulberry tree in our garden from which I used to tear leaves until there were almost none left. After about a month of gobbling mulberry leaves the silk worms disappeared into tiny hairy white cocoons.

“That’s where the silk is, she said, and now I will tell you the five thousand-year old story of silk.”

Princess E-hwa, which means beautiful flower was the most beautiful princess of all. She had long silky black hair that fell straight down to her waist. Her ladies-in-waiting twisted it into a long braid and then wound it around her head. Although she was very tiny, when her hair was done up this way she was at least another foot taller. She had shiny, jet-black eyes and was always laughing so her eyes looked like small slits over her beautiful high cheekbones, which were the color of peaches. They even smelled like peaches.

Princess E-hwa was so beautiful, and such a gracious, clever person, that princes from far and wide came to the court at Chang An to ask for her hand in marriage. But she was always so busy in her garden tending the mulberry trees and playing her lute that she never wanted to leave that sacred place.

One morning after breakfast, (she ate a soft white pork bun and tea) she walked through the garden. She spied the tiniest worm munching on a leaf of one of her mulberry trees.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“I am a silk worm and one day I will save your life,” he replied. “Just wait and see!” Soon his brothers and sisters, aunts and cousins appeared and they all began munching the mulberry leaves.

“You are ruining my trees!” cried Princess E-hwah, and she began to weep. But the worms just kept on munching and getting fatter and puffier. Then she noticed something mysterious had happened. The worms had vanished and the garden was filled instead with round white cocoons that the worms had spun. “Now what?” she asked as she fiddled with the cocoon in her warm hands while sipping a cup of hot tea.

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