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We are little critters who live in the black earth beneath the desert The people on Mother Earth can’t imagine such a large expanse of fertile humus lying dozens of meters beneath the boundless desert Our race has lived here for generations We have neither eyes nor any olfactory sense In this large nursery, such apparatus is useless Our lives are simple, for we merely use our long beaks to dig the earth, eat the nutritious soil, and then excrete it We live in happiness and harmony because we have abundant resources in our home town Thus, we can all eat our fill without a dispute arising At any rate, I’ve never heard of one In our spare time, we congregate to recall anecdotes of our forebears We begin by remembering the oldest of our ancestors and then run through the others The remembrances are pleasurable, filled with outlandish salty and sweet flavours, as well as some crispy amber – the immemorial turpentine In our recollections, there is a blank passage that is difficult to describe Broadly speaking, as one of our elders (the one with the longest beak) was digging the earth, he suddenly crossed the dividing line and vanished in the desert above He never returned to us Whenever we remembered this, we fell silent I sensed that everyone was afraid   Even though people never descended to our underground, we actually gained all kinds of information about the mortals above us I don’t know what sort of channel this information came from It is said that it was very mysterious, and that it had something to do with our builds I’m an average-sized, ordinary individual of my genus Like everyone else, I dig the earth every day and excrete Recalling our ancestors is the greatest pleasure in my life But when I sleep, I have some odd dreams I dream of seeing people; I dream of seeing the sky above Human beings are good at movement They feel bumpy to the touch I’m extremely jealous of their well-developed limbs, because our limbs have atrophied underground We all move