There was a year, somewhere in the east of this land, when the rains simply did not come.
You know the kind of year I mean, even if you have never lived through one. The ground cracks open like old skin. The wells go quiet. People stop washing their courtyards and start measuring every cup. And a whole kingdom, from the king in his palace down to the smallest child in the farthest village, begins to think about water in a way that people who have always had enough of it never quite understand.
In the chief city there was one great cistern. An enormous old stone reservoir, the kind built by some long-dead king who had the good sense to plan for exactly this. And in that terrible dry year, that single cistern was holding the whole kingdom up. Every morning the water was measured out from it, so much for the city, so much for the provinces, so much and no more. And due to this, every drop was counted, because every drop was a day of somebody’s life.
So you can imagine the fear, the night the watchman came running to the palace.
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He was out of breath when he reached the king. Sire, he said, there is a leak. Somewhere in the water storage tank. The water is running out of it into the dark, and I cannot find where.
Now this was the worst news the king could have heard. A leak in the tank, in a year like this, was not an inconvenience. It was the difference between a kingdom that survived the drought and a kingdom that did not.
The king came out at once, and his whole court came stumbling out behind him, torches in hand, down to the great cistern in the middle of the night. And they searched. They ran their hands along the cold stone, they held their lamps low, they looked everywhere a hole might be and they could not find it. The water was going somewhere, they could hear it, but the leak itself would not show itself to them.
And then, while they were still searching, still frightened, still helpless, the water somehow stopped. Just like that. The flowing stopped. The level held. Whatever had been draining their lifeline into the darkness had, somehow, closed itself.
The king did not understand it. But he was not going to argue with good fortune in a year that had offered him so little of it. He posted a guard, and everyone went uneasily back to bed.
The next morning, in the daylight, they went back to find out what had happened.
And this time, with the sun to help them, the workmen found the hole. A small thing, low down in the stone, exactly where a leak like that would start. And pressed into it, filling it completely, holding back the whole weight of that great reservoir with nothing but its own small body. It was a frog.
A frog. That was all. A plain little frog had wedged itself into the gap in the night and simply stayed there, and its body had been the only thing standing between the kingdom and an empty cistern.
The workmen, of course, did not see it that way. What they saw was a frog where a frog should not be. A slimy little creature in the wall of the sacred reservoir and they reached in and grabbed it, ready to fling it down onto the stones and be done with it.
Seeing that, the king sudden asked them to stop.
Stop. Don’t you understand what you’re holding? That frog is the reason there is any water left at all. He held back the whole cistern with his own body while we ran about in the dark like fools. He is not a pest. He is our benefactor. Put him down gently.
And so the workmen, who a moment before had been about to kill it, laid the little frog down on the ground as carefully as if it were made of glass.
The frog sat there for a moment on the warm stone. Then it turned toward the water, ready to slip back into the storage tank and be gone.
But before it went, it said one thing to the king. And it is the only reason, I think, that this small story has been remembered at all, when a thousand bigger ones have been forgotten.
“Sire — to find the worth in a lowly creature is harder work than ruling a whole kingdom.”
And then it was gone, back into the dark water, leaving the king standing there with that sentence turning over in his mind.
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I have always loved that the frog does not thank the king. It does not grovel, or weep with relief at being spared. It has just spent a whole night holding back a reservoir with its body, and when it finally speaks, it says something the king will be chewing on for the rest of his life.
Because the frog is right, and the king knows it. Anyone can respect what is obviously great. Anyone can bow to the powerful, praise the beautiful, honour the ones the whole world already honours. That takes nothing. But to look at a small slimy frog in the wall of a tank and see a benefactor instead of a pest, and to find the worth in the thing everyone else is about to throw away is indeed a rare thing. That is the hard thing. Harder, the frog says, than ruling a kingdom.
And the proof is right there in the story. A whole court of clever, powerful men looked straight at that frog and saw something to be killed. Only one man in the whole kingdom looked at it and saw what it had done. That is why he was the king, I suppose. Not because he wore the crown but because he could see.
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