Section 1
Once upon a time, there was a prince who owned the biggest and most wonderful set of books in the whole wide world. His collection was filled with amazing pictures made by carving lines into metal and pressing the metal onto paper. The prince was really smart and knew a lot about every place and every person in the world. However, there was one thing he really wanted to know but couldn’t find the answer to - he wanted to know about a special garden called the “garden of paradise”. He looked in all his books but couldn’t find any information about it. When the prince was a very young boy and just started going to school, his grandmother told him about that magical garden. She said that in this garden, each flower was actually a delicious cake, and the center part of the flower was filled with yummy wine. But that’s not all - on each cake, there was some information written on different subjects like history, geography, and tables. So, if anyone wanted to learn about these subjects, they just needed to eat some of the cakes from the garden and the more they ate, the more they would learn. When the prince was a little boy, he believed everything his grandmother told him about the magical garden of paradise. But as he got older and learned more things, he realized that the garden was probably even more amazing than what his grandmother had described. The prince said to himself, “Why did Eve take that fruit from the tree of knowledge? Why did Adam eat the fruit that they were not supposed to? If I was there, I would have stopped them, and then there wouldn’t be any bad things in the world.” The prince couldn’t stop thinking about the garden of paradise. He thought about it all the time, every day until he turned seventeen years old.
One day, the prince was walking by himself in the forest, which he loved to do very much. As the day started to come to an end, it began to get dark. The clouds in the sky got really thick and heavy, and it started to rain really hard, almost like a waterfall coming from the sky. It became so dark outside that the prince couldn’t see anything, not even his own hand in front of his face. He kept walking, but the ground was very slippery, and he fell down a few times on the wet grass or on rocks that were sticking out of the ground. Because of the heavy rain, everything around the prince was very wet, and he didn’t have anything dry to wear. Eventually, the prince had to climb over big rocks that were covered in wet moss, and water was squirting out from the moss as he climbed. The prince started feeling very weak and tired, but then he heard a strange noise that sounded like something rushing towards him. As he looked ahead, he saw a big cave and noticed that there was a bright light coming from inside it. Inside the cave, there was a huge fire burning, and the prince saw that a beautiful deer with big, branched antlers was being cooked on a spit between two pine trees. The deer was slowly spinning in front of the fire to cook evenly, and there was an old woman sitting nearby who was as big and strong as a man. She kept adding more pieces of wood to the fire to keep it going.
The old woman noticed the prince and said to him, “Come inside! Sit by the fire and warm yourself up.”
The prince sat down on the ground and told the old woman, “It’s very drafty here.”
The old woman responded, “Just wait until my sons come back home. You’re in the Cavern of the Winds, and my sons are the four Winds of heaven. Do you understand what that means?”
The prince asked, “Where are your sons?”
“I’m not going to answer that silly question,” replied the woman. “My sons are very busy right now. They are playing a game with the clouds up in the sky in the king’s hall,” she said, pointing upwards.
“I notice that you speak in a more rough and harsh manner compared to the women I am used to,” said the prince.
“Yes, that’s because they have no other work to do. But as a mother, I have to be strict with them to keep them disciplined. Even though they are very stubborn, I am able to control them. Can you look at those four bags hanging on the wall? My sons are just as scared of those sacks as you used to be of the rat behind the looking glass. I can fold them up and put them in the sacks without them even resisting, I tell you. There they stay and won’t even think of coming out until I let them. Look, here comes one of them.”
