Stories · How Things Came to Be

The Girl Who Drew the River

13 min · England · Kindness · Wonder

On a quiet prehistoric riverbank, a small girl who loves pressing marks into clay meets a traveller whose words she cannot understand, and discovers that a few patient shapes drawn on a flat stone can carry a message across the gap between them: the gentle birth of writing, born not of cleverness but of kindness and unhurried attention.

Retold from Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling.

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Story 3 of How Things Came to Be, starting at 27:51.