The book's first part closes with its longest tale — and its sharpest. Ta Thaen is a novice who drinks in secret, and when his money runs out he invents a grander living: he will tour the country as a wonder-working forest ascetic, with three drinking companions as his pious students. At the village of Kok he prophesies a thunderbolt that will destroy the village in seven days — unless the village pays for a rite, and shuts itself out of the ceremony hall on pain of madness. Inside the hall the four feast unseen. But a buffalo-herd boy of fourteen, Chao San, hears the drunken quarrelling, and peeks through the palm-leaf wall — and when he tells the truth, the whole village agrees that the boy himself must be the mad one.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
From the Gatiloke by Suttantaprija Ind (1859–1924), Cambodia's treasury of Khmer folk tales, first published in parts in Phnom Penh in 1914–1921 — public domain, and told here in a fresh in-house English rendering made from the Khmer text, in the book's own order. With this tale the book's first part ends, complete, exactly as the book ends it. One question-chapter near the collection's opening is held back under house rule — its matter is murder itself, and such a tale is not read until it is ruled on; it stands recorded in the collection's written register, in its place.
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