Imagine that the world was once young.
Imagine that 100 million years ago, give or take the time for a lunch break, a Great Ancient Dragon Of Organic Limestone And Granite roused himself from a deep slumber and flew into the heavens, hungry for the meal of Stars, Planets, And Meteors that would sate his mighty appetite and allow him to live another 100 million years. He had no worries to worry about and no qualms to qualm about, for during his long life he had known only of hunger and satiation, and sometimes if he ate one too many Stars, indigestion. GADOOLAG had not eaten in a long, long time, and so thinking only of SPAM, he managed to miss with his great eyes the New Things that had cropped up while he had slept. Among these New Things were carbon based life forms, the most perplexing and troublesome (as he would come to find out) of which was Man. Man and Woahman (so named because of what one Man had said to another when first the fairer half had been seen) marveled at the incomprehensible sight in the skies and in the great tradition of Seeing A New Entity, ran to gather enough people to kill it (actually, Man fainted at the sight of danger coursing through the clouds and it was Woahman who ran for help...this was also a great tradition).
Arriving back at the village, she fulfilled her role as harbinger of the great tradition and shouted "I Nearly Saw A New Entity!"
"Nearly?" asked the multitudes, who were quite used to both the great traditions at this point and sent someone to drag the comatose man back into town.
"Yes! It was so large I could see neither the beginning nor end of it! So, I NEARLY Saw A New Entity!"
"She's what? What'd she say?" asked a blind and deaf old man to the mute old woman who had neither the time nor patience to write out a whole sentence in the dirt. She did as best she could, given that she would have rather of done nothing, and scratched into the orange soil some shorthand, which the deaf man read and repeated to himself aloud in a whisper as old people tend to.
"INSANE? She's INSANE?" he asked of the air.
The people, who knew better than to ignore the rantings of a blind and deaf old man, labeled the Woahman INSANE and heeded her warning, as they knew better than to ignore the rantings of INSANE woahmen as well. They prayed there and then on the spot, and because the World Was Young, their Gods listened.
***
His mind on the salty crunchiness and tangy wholesomeness of the fourth planet from the Sun, a planet he always made sure to take a bite out of for dessert, GADOOLAG was wholly unprepared for Ayyapan's Righteous Tulwar as it plunged into his side. He did not know what ART was, but like all of us, he knew it when he saw it. He roared such a roar that the world had never known, and the Hindus were quieted, as were their Gods.
But his roar alerted others to his presence, and in the great tradition, others gathered to slay him, which was sad because all he really wanted was a nice Red Dwarf, an asteroid belt or two and maybe some nebulae for desserts and wouldn't you be surprised and maybe just a bit annoyed if you went out for a taco bell run and the Gods descended on you like a plague for no reason you could discern, especially if you had never even HEARD of Gods? Soon, Zeus's Thunderbolt, Thor's Mjolnir, the IRS's Audits and thousands of other attacks were streaking and striking the great beast as he sped by, ripping and tearing and gouging his silicon based fleshmeats without abandon. His last thoughts before dying were-
Well, that's not important. What's important is that GADOOLAG fell from the heavens and landed with a massive thud just off the coast of Hanoi, Vietnam, which was not yet Hanoi, but a series of rice paddies that some people eventually found and decided to move in with. His blood, a green ochre of salt and silt, came gushing out of him in slow, timeless waves, and still do to this day. The eventual natives, when they found GADOOLAG, feared him even in death and asked their Chief How Long They Must Keep At Bay. The name, in its shortened form, stuck: Ha Long Bay.
The Great Dragon can still be seen - small mountains of organic limestone and granite pocked with ancient wounds, deep caves and chambers that spark of divinity. Over 3000 of these mounds can be seen above the sea his blood created, and the careful observer might notice how they are marked by slashes that run their entire length, as if a giant with too much time on his hands came by one day with an Xacto and incised neat lines.
***
Tomorrow, I leave for Sri Lanka, and perhaps I can find another story there.
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This too, shall pass.