Why the Sea Is Salty

Long ago, a king had a treasure that no one else in the world possessed. It did not look like much. It was a small stone millstone, two round grey stones with a wooden handle, the kind every farmhouse used to grind beans and grain. But this one was different. Whatever its owner asked for, it ground out. Say "rice" and turn the handle, and white rice would pour out between the stones. Say "cloth", and out came bolts of silk. Say "gold", and gold came trickling out like sand.

The king did not use it for foolish things. When there was famine in the south, he quietly asked it for rice and sent the rice to the hungry. When the treasury ran low, he asked it for silver and paid his soldiers. And when he was finished, he said the secret word that made it stop, wrapped it in silk and put it back in a locked room deep in the palace. Only the king knew the word. He had never told it to anyone.

Very few people had ever seen the millstone. But stories travel, especially stories about treasure, and one day the story of the king’s magic millstone reached the ears of a thief.

The thief

The thief was a clever man, and a lazy one. He could have earned an honest living, but he had always preferred to take what other people had worked for. When he heard about the millstone, he could think of nothing else.

“Imagine owning a thing like that,” he said to himself. “I’d never have to work, or steal, ever again. I’d just sit and turn the handle.”

He went to the capital and loitered near the palace for days. He made friends with a kitchen servant and bought him drinks until he talked. He learned when the guards changed, which gate the cooks used before dawn, and which corridor led to the locked room. Then, one moonless night, he climbed the palace wall, slipped through the shadows, picked the lock, found the millstone wrapped in its silk and tucked it under his arm. By the time the sky began to grow light, he was out of the city.

Out to sea

By morning the palace was in an uproar. The king’s soldiers galloped down every road, stopping travellers and searching their bundles. The thief heard the hoofbeats behind him and knew he could not hide on land for long.

He ran to the coast. On the beach lay a fishing boat, its owner asleep in a hut nearby. The thief pushed it into the waves, jumped in and rowed out to sea as fast as he could, until the shore was only a thin dark line behind him and the soldiers, if they came, would see nothing but water.

Out on the open sea, he finally felt safe. He shipped the oars, set the millstone down in the bottom of the boat and looked at it greedily. What should he ask for first?

“Gold,” he said to himself, and then he hesitated. A poor man suddenly covered in gold would be noticed. People would ask questions. Someone would remember that the king had lost a treasure.

He sat in the rocking boat with his chin in his hand, thinking. Rice was bulky. Silk would be recognised. Jewels were too easy to trace.

Then he had a better idea. In those days salt was precious. Every family needed it to cook and to make kimchi and to keep fish and vegetables through the winter, and it was worth a great deal of money. Nobody would look twice at a man selling salt. If he had a boatload of it, he could sail into any harbour, sell it, and nobody would ever wonder where it came from.

“Salt,” he said. “Make me salt!” And he took hold of the handle and turned it.

More and more salt

At first nothing happened. Then a thin white trickle came from between the stones, sparkling in the sunlight. The thief licked his finger, touched it, and tasted it. It was salt, the finest, whitest salt he had ever seen.

He laughed out loud. He let go of the handle, but the millstone went on turning by itself, and the trickle became a stream, and the stream became a flood. Salt heaped up in the bottom of the boat, burying the oars and the coil of rope. The thief clapped his hands and danced from foot to foot, already counting the money in his head.

“Salt!” he crowed to the empty sea. “All the salt I want, for ever! I’ll be the richest salt merchant in the kingdom, and I’ll never lift a finger again!” A seagull wheeled overhead and cried, and he waved at it.

Soon the salt was up to his ankles. Then it was up to his knees. The boat began to sit lower in the water, and the waves came closer and closer to the top of the sides.

“That’s enough,” said the thief. “Stop now. That will do nicely.”

He said it in the friendly, satisfied voice of a man who has eaten a good meal and is pushing his bowl away. He was already thinking about which harbour to sail to.

The millstone did not stop.

“Stop!” he said, more loudly. “Enough! No more salt!”

The handle went on turning. The salt went on pouring.

He grabbed the handle with both hands and tried to hold it still, but the millstone was stronger than he was and dragged his arms round with it. He tried to lift the top stone off the bottom one, but it would not budge. He tried every word he could think of: “Stop!” “Halt!” “Finished!” “No more!” “Please!” Nothing worked. The king had never told anyone the secret word that stopped the millstone, and the thief, in all his careful planning, had never once thought to find it out.

The salt rose to his waist. The boat groaned under the weight. Seawater slopped in over one side, then over the other. The thief tried to throw the millstone overboard, but he could not lift it. He tried to bail, but there was nowhere to bail to.

It poured over the sides of the boat into the sea, and for a moment he hoped it might go on spilling out faster than it came in. But the millstone only ground faster, as if it were enjoying itself, and the white heap rose and rose.

And then, with a great gulp, the boat, the salt, the thief and the millstone all sank beneath the waves.

Still grinding

The thief was never seen again. But the millstone sank slowly down through the green water until it settled on the sandy bottom of the sea. And since nobody had ever told it to stop, it went on turning.

Back on land, the king’s soldiers searched the coast for days, but they found nothing except a fisherman complaining that someone had stolen his boat. The king mourned his lost treasure for the rest of his life. He was the only one who knew the word that could have saved the thief, and he never told a soul what it was.

It is still turning down there now, in the dark at the bottom of the ocean, grinding out salt, and salt, and more salt, year after year.

And that, Korean grandmothers say, is why the sea is salty.

The two brothers

In another common Korean version, there is no king and no palace thief. A kind younger brother is given the millstone as a reward for a good deed and becomes rich. His greedy older brother borrows it, cannot make it stop, gets into terrible trouble, and has to give it back. The younger brother then sells it for a high price to a salt merchant, who sails out to sea, asks it for salt, does not know how to stop it, and sinks. The ending is the same: the millstone is still grinding at the bottom of the ocean.

Talk about it

Why does the thief ask for salt rather than gold? What do you think the secret word was? Can you think of other stories where someone gets a magic object but does not know how to control it?

Words to know

Maetdol (맷돌) is a hand millstone, two round stones turned with a wooden handle. Sogeum (소금) means salt. Badanmul (바닷물) means seawater. Jubo (주보) is a magic treasure that brings wealth.