Once upon a time, the Island of Oleron was an island like an oven, because it lay directly under the sun; and the people who lived on it had skins as dark as burned toast. In the height of summer they would have been burned to a crisp if, each year, the ocean currents had not carried to them a splendid iceberg which would always be washed ashore on the beach between Point Chassiron and the Rock of Antioche.

    One fine day, the mountain of ice all the way from the Pole would loom over the horizon of salt waves, like the brightest of clouds, sparkling with purple and pink. It would grow bigger as it approached with the stately slowness of some sea-borne dromedary, until it grounded among the breakers. Then, to the sound of their tom-toms, the Oleronions would chip away at it with their antler-picks and fill their canoes with pieces of ice. By this means they could cool their wine and laugh at the heat.

    They would have laughed at their benevolent mountain too, if only it had not turned turtle from time to time, since the sea melted the base faster than they could chip lumps off the top. There was no warning when this happened, and the sharks soon snapped up the Oleronions who were thrown into the water. So the iceberg was skirted by a fringe of bloodpink foam and all the tribe humbly worshipped it as a god.

    Now that year, as the iceberg touched and grounded, the whole mass creaking and groaning, in speechless amazement the Oleronions beheld a hideous creature imprisoned in it.

    This coal-black, hairy monster, with eyes of flame, gaped its red-raw mouth at them, and worked its jaws armed with teeth like saws. It pressed its nose against the ice of its prison, the better to stare at the tribe gathered on the beach.

    With its stubby legs and its long arms, at first they took it for a chimpanzee, but the witch doctor cried out, "It's Tore-mo-Icu, the man-eater! Nobody must touch the iceberg! If we smash the ice, he'll get out and eat us all up !"

    And the frightened Oleronions had to resign themselves to mulled wine that summer.

    Overcome by the heat and with their tongues hanging out, each day they staggered down the beach to look at the iceberg, hoping against hope that they would find the monster frozen to death. But he was still alive and kicking, or rather pacing his prison like a wild beast in search of a way out, and when he saw men on the beach he stared at them so greedily from his prison that they shivered.

    After a week of this, the Oleronions noticed something rather odd. When a lean man walked past, Tore-mo-Icu's eyes ate into him, to be sure, but when it was a fat man, they lit up like a pair of glow worms, his tongue licked its lips and he began to jump up and down in such a frenzy of impatience that the whole berg trembled.

    The thin men met secretly and said among themselves, "What risk do we run? It's fat men the monster likes. If it got out, it would eat them up and would spare us -poor devils who are only skin and bone and hair- because it would have eaten its fi1l. And then we could kill it when it went to sleep."

    But the more cautious of the lean men objected, "We want to be surer of what he does like. Let's dig a narrow tunnel into the ice, and ask him. Then we'll see what to do."

    When the witch doctor heard that the lean men were going to ignore his ban and dig a hole in the iceberg, he did not dare object because most of the tribe was lean. He made just one condition, namely, at the ice they got from digging the hole should be given to him.

    This was agreed, and the lean men dug a little hole into the iceberg and asked Tore-mo-Icu, "Monster, which would you rather have on your plate, fat or lean?"

    Then the man-eater's voice answered from his prison in the ice and it was so terrifying that the Oleronion mothers had to soothe their babies.

    "I follow two rules," he bellowed. "The first is to go for the juiciest bits: and the second is..."

    But so anxious were the lean Oleronions to cool their wine, that they did not listen to the rest of what he had to say. Since the fat bits are the juiciest, they felt quite reassured as they quarried deeper and ever deeper into the iceberg. Too late, alas, the fat men started to do physical exercises in order to grow lean, and as this only increased their appetites, it had the opposite effect-they grew fatter still.

    When there was only a thin wall of ice left, the monster simply pushed his way through and stepped ashore with such a terrible bellow everyone in the tribe fell flat on his face on the beach.

    Tore-mo-Icu had not lied. He chose the fattest of these prostrate victims with which to break his long fast.

    And then he ate the lean ones.

    Before he knocked the head of the last of these on a rock on the shore, he told him, between belches, "Bird brains, why didn't you listen to the rest of what I said to you ? It was this: my second rule is to vary my diet a bit."

    The witch doctor was the only one to escape this dreadful fate. When nobody was looking he had slipped aboard his canoe and said good-bye to the island in the nick of time.

    Thus the earliest inhabitants of Oleron vanished into history. The Charentais on the opposite coast soon saw the island was deserted. Over the Straits of Le Coureau they came and landed on the beach. They were so scruffy and spoke such ghastly jargon that the monster swam to safety without daring to stand and face them. The invaders settled in and from them the present population is descended. The sun has moved away and no iceberg drifts down from the pole now. But the Oleronites make light of their lack of Arctic ice-and be it mulled, tepid or chilled, they take their wine as they find it and drink it with gusto.