And there was only one vulture but there were many turtles. And the boar told this event to his friends, exactly as the reverend Basubarga saw it happen. Another fable, still more widely distributed and clinching the same moral, is that of the _kanchil_ (a small, extremely fleet species of deer) and the snail; travelling to Europe, it is there best known in its German form recorded by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. Of its many variants in the Malay Archipelago we may mention the wager between a snail and a tiger as to which could most easily jump a river; the snail, attaching herself to one of her big competitor’s paws, wins, of course, and convinces the terror of the woods by means of his hairs adhering to her body, that she is accustomed to feed on his kind, two or three per diem, freshly killed, whereupon the tiger leaves off blustering and sneaks away.[130] The prose version of the _Tantri_ which, somewhat different from the two metrical readings known to us, contains the vulture and turtle incident, dates probably from the last half of the Mojopahit period and is therefore at least four centuries younger than the _chandi_ Mendoot, so that its author and the sculptors of the scenes from popular beast-stories on the temple’s walls, must have had access to a common stock of ancient fables. All turned it to best advantage and the decorators of this splendid edifice seized their opportunity to let the men and animals they carved in illustration of their national literature, express what they had to say in their passionate overflow of the creative instinct. They gave their narrative a frame in ornament of dazzling beauty, sweetly harmonious with the moral of the lessons they taught, stirring to deepest emotion; they cased thoughts of happiest purport in shrines embossed and laced with fretwork more suggestive of ivory than of stone. They adorned the Mendoot as a bride, to be displayed before her husband, the Boro Budoor, revelling in the fanciful idea which makes the _saktis_ of the Dhyani Buddhas carry budding flowers to honour incarnate love. The wealth of statuary, while orthodox Buddhism did not admit the worship of images either of a saintly founder of temples or of his saintly followers; the deities with the attributes of Doorga, Siva and Brahma, who diversify the ornament of the exterior walls, from which right distribution of lines and surfaces may be learnt in rhythmical relation to contour and dimension, are further indications of the syncretism signalising the tolerance, the fraternal mingling of different creeds in the distant age of Mataram’s vigour and artistic energy.