The Sandy Road

Also known as Vannupatha Jataka

• 4 minute read
• Ages 7-11
• Jataka Tales

A merchant took a caravan of five hundred carts across a desert.

The sand was too hot to cross by day, so they travelled at night. A guide sat on the first cart watching the stars and calling the direction, and the carts followed one behind another in the dark.

They carried enough water for the crossing and not much more, because water is heavy.

The mistake

On the last night, with only one stage left, the guide worked out that they would arrive before dawn.

So he gave the order that everybody had been waiting for: throw out the water. All of it. There was no sense hauling heavy jars for the final few hours when there would be a river at the other end.

The men tipped the jars over the side and the carts moved off much faster, and the guide lay back on the front cart to watch the stars.

And he fell asleep.

The oxen, with nobody calling directions, turned slowly and gradually in the way animals do, until the whole caravan had come round in a wide circle in the dark.

At sunrise they were back at the ashes of their own fire from the night before, and the sun came up on five hundred carts, five hundred men and no water at all.

The digging

The men sat down and gave up. Some of them lay under the carts. Nobody spoke.

The merchant walked out from the camp on his own, because he could not sit still, and he looked at the ground.

And in one place there was a patch of grass.

It was thin grass, barely anything, but it was green, and the merchant stood and looked at it for a long time.

Grass does not grow in dry sand.

He went back and got the strongest men up on their feet and made them bring spades.

"Dig here."

Sixty feet

They dug all morning.

They went down through sand and then through gravel, and after sixty feet the spade struck rock, and the men threw down their tools and said what everyone had been saying since sunrise, which was that it was hopeless and the merchant was killing them for nothing.

The merchant climbed down into the hole himself.

He knelt on the rock and put his ear against it.

And he heard water. Not much of it. But under that rock something was moving.

He came up and found the youngest boy in the caravan, gave him a hammer, and sent him down.

"There is water under that stone. Break it."

The boy went down into the hole and hit the rock, and hit it again, and kept hitting it while everybody stood round the edge above him and watched, and on some blow or other the rock split and the water came up through the crack and rose, and went on rising, and filled the hole.