Before the sky could be propped up, someone had to make it — and among the Hei Miao (the Black Miao, named for their dark clothes) the making is not recited but sung. Werner's Myths & Legends of China (a 1922 compilation of Chinese myth) records that this people keep, in verse, "legends of the Creation and of a deluge", chanted antiphonally at feasts "in stanzas of unequal length," one voice asking and another answering. The song begins as pure question: "Who made Heaven and earth? / Who made insects? / Who made men?" The first answer only names the maker — the Heavenly King. But pressed on the how, the response turns startlingly bodily: the Heavenly King "Spat a lot of spittle into his hand, / Clapped his hands with a noise, / Produced Heaven and earth".

From spittle and a thunderclap the world arrives. The legend goes on to tell "how the sun was made and fixed in its place," though the record's own compiler loses patience and waves the sequel away as "exceedingly silly." What outlasts his impatience is that first gesture: creation as a clap of two hands, insects out of the tall grass, men and women called from nothing by a chorus that keeps confessing, between its verses, "I who speak don't know."

This is a thin shelf for so vast a motif. Of all the cosmogonies Thompson gathers under the creation of the universe — the Norse and the Persian, the Jewish, the Hawaiian and Tahitian — only this one minority song is wired to served text, and even it reaches us half-mocked by the man who wrote it down. Yet the question it opens is the oldest there is: if the world began in a clapped pair of hands, who first taught the hands to clap?