Question

“Payah kun,” said the Eldest Magician, meaning, “That is quite right”; and he breathed upon the great rocks and lumps of earth that All-the-Elephant-there-was had thrown up, and they became the great Himalayan Mountains, and you can look them out on the map. . . .



Then the Moon rose big and full over the water, and the Eldest Magician said to the hunchbacked old man who sits in the Moon spinning a fishing-line with which he hopes one day to catch the world, “Ho! Fisher of the Moon, are you playing with the Sea?”



–“The Crab That Played with the Sea,”

Rudyard Kipling

What is the narrator’s tone in this passage?

angry
informative
sorrowful
whimsical

Answer 1

whimsical

The language is playful and fanciful—magicians breathing mountains into being, a fisherman in the Moon—giving the passage a light, imaginative tone.