Week 10 Story: The Daughters of the Oasis

Lake Huacachina in Peru

(Source: Cassandra from Escaping NY)

The Daughters of the Oasis

There once was a caravan of refugees that was travelling the desert and it had been days since they had their last drink of water and months since they had seen the last rainfall. Half of the people were completely worn out, questioning if they could continue on the trip. The three daughters of the caravan chief were not ready to die in a shameful death in the middle of the desert so they convinced everybody to at least get to the top of the giant sand dune in the distance before they gave up on their journey and so they did. 

After climbing up the sand dune, they miraculously saw an oasis of water in the distance. All of the people rushed for the pool of water that looked like the answer to all of their prayers, as it sat glimmering beautifully in the middle of the dry desert sands. The chief of the caravan got to the oasis first in his carriage and he fell down to his knees at the edge of the water and scooped some up into his mouth. The moment the chief had been waiting for for days was ruined when he tasted that the water was salty.

The daughters of the chief could not believe his discovery. They had worked so hard to convince everybody to keep going and they wasted their last bit of energy for this. While everybody in the caravan was laying down in the heat, debating on how they wanted to move forward with their lives, the three daughters of the chief were doing the same. They felt like it was their fault that their people were in that situation, but there was nothing of this world that they could do to quench their thirst. The oldest daughter had the idea to sacrifice themselves and convinced her two sisters to offer their lives along with her to the goddess of water, Pani, by jumping into the oasis and drowning themselves.

If the sacrifice did not work, the girls would be dead which they believed would be their fate anyways so they walked to the edge of the oasis, held each other's hands, and jumped in. The chief saw this happening so he jumped in to save them, but he couldn't find them in the water. The girls had drowned, but Pani had watched and admired the bravery of the girls so she turned the salty pond into a crisp and cold freshwater oasis.

When the chief realized he could not save his daughters, he started crying in the oasis, accidentally swallowing some of the water. In the midst of his panicked mourning, he tasted that the water was no longer salty.

The people of the caravan mourned the loss of the chief's daughters, but also revered them for their sacrifice. Some people chose to settle along the side of the oasis and built a community there on the foundation of access to the freshwater. Some people in the caravan cherished Pani's blessing, drinking as much water as they could and living lazily next to the oasis for a couple of days, but then they moved on on their journey. The freshwater oasis still sits in the middle of the desert today, providing hope and strength to those on a journey through the desert, just as the chief's three daughters did.

Author's Note: This is my rendition of the Tejas Legend "Maidens Who Broke a Drought". In this story, a tribe of Indian suffered a drought so a medicine man told the chief of the tribe that maidens had to be fed to a great serpent that was the chief of all snakes. Some young girls sacrificed their lives but a goddess who watched over them felt so bad that they were going to jump off a cliff to be fed to the chief of snakes. The goddess turned the maidens into beebrush when they touched the ground and they are said to bloom every summer. This act of the goddess scared the chief of snakes away, and the cloud were no longer afraid to come rain over the tribe again.

Part of the Tejas Legends unit. Story source: When the Storm God Rides: Tejas and Other Indian Legends retold by Florence Stratton and illustrated by Berniece Burrough (1936).