The shelf's account of the Long-legged People is a note in a catalogue of marvellous nations. "The arms of the Long-legged People are of a normal length," the record says; only their legs are strange, grown to match the reach of a neighbouring race — "The Long-armed People are about thirty feet high," whose arms hang from shoulder to ground. That far country was found, the tale goes, when explorers heard of a coat with sleeves thirty feet long drawn out of the sea, and fitted out an expedition to seek its wearers. Each people feeds itself by "wading in the water, and taking the fish with their hands" rather than with hook or net.

The two are drawn as a single working pair. Those with the long arms gather "the shellfish of the shallow waters"; those with the long legs reach "the surface fish from the deeper localities"; and so, their unlike bodies making them "of mutual assistance," "thus the two gather a harvest otherwise unobtainable." They keep company, in this 1922 compilation Myths & Legends of China, with stranger neighbours still — the Armless People "whose legs instead grow out of their shoulders", who "pick flowers with their toes", and the One-eyed People a little to the east.

Only this Chinese witness is wired to served text, and the address is a single passage of mythic geography with no wider tradition behind it. What turns a deformity, in this telling, into the very thing that feeds a people — and binds it, for life, to its opposite?