Three shelves, three ways up. In the Kalevala the oak is the sky-tree gone wrong: "Tree of heaven is not growing" until a sea-giant plants it, and then it grows too well — "With its branches hides the sunlight", "And the starlight dies in heaven" [The Kalevala, Rune II]. A copper-clad pigmy from the ocean, swelling into a giant, fells it, "Shaking earth and heaven in falling"; whoever takes a branch "Has obtained eternal welfare", and of a tree-top, "He has gained the master magic" [ibid.]. In the Russian tale the sky-tree is a ladder with a body count: "The cabbage grew and grew, grew right up to the sky"; the old man "climbed right up to the sky, cut a hole in the sky", found a wish-mill above, and dropped the wife he was carrying up in a sack — she "was smashed all to pieces" [Russian Folk-Tales, Chapter V]. Egypt roots the tree in heaven itself: "Oh thou Sycomore of Nut, give me of the water and of the wind", prays the dead [The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Chapter LIX]; the translator's note glosses it as "the mythological tree in heaven which produces both wind and water" [ibid., editor's note]. Menace, ladder, cistern: Finland fells it, Russia climbs it, Egypt drinks from it.