E is for the Elephant Princess

Today's princess is brought to you from Malaysia, by the author if this neat little collection.

The story starts out with ("the prophet") Adam and Eve having a fight. Start at the Beginning, right? With a capital B.
Well, this fight ends in a breakup because Eve decides to move "across the sea" and become "the queen of the other side." In addition to that, she also has a daughter, a princess. Princess soon grows curious about what is across the sea, and defying her mother's orders to leave people's fields alone she crosses the water and stomps around until she is turned into an elephant for her carelessness. Oops.

The prince that lives nearby sees her in her new form, and, guess what, he has never seen an elephant before. When he sees the monster "with tails on both ends" he hits in on the forehead with an iron pike and breaks the tip of the weapon off into the elephant's skin. Elephant princess runs home, and the prince follows, suspecting that it was not just an ordinary monster. The rest is pretty standard: he finds the princess, removes the iron blade from her forehead, brings her back to life and health, and marries her.

BUT.

The moment the princess and her thirty-nine attendants set foot on the Prince's fields after the wedding, on their way to their new home... they turn into elephants.

End of story.

So, the prince now has forty great elephants instead of a wife. Some would call that a good deal. I suspect this story was supposed to explain the origin of elephants. It certainly did it in a very original way.

Moral of the story: Treat elephants well, one in every forty is a princess.

(The picture has nothing to do with the story, it is a TV show aptly named "Elephant Princess." I was amused.)