In the creation account recorded among the Hmong Njua of northern Thailand and echoed in Hmong funeral song, the frog Nplooj Lwg made heaven and earth, a young world in which human beings and spirits dwelt together and death had no lasting hold. The frog told the first people that the world was no larger than the palm of a hand and the sole of a foot, and when they travelled and saw its true vastness they killed the frog for lying. Dying, it cursed them: henceforth people and spirits would live in separate worlds, humankind would know sickness and death, heat and rain would alternate, the leaves would fall from the trees, and the dead would no longer rise on the thirteenth day. The story stands beside the account of Saub's creation as an alternative Hmong cosmogony, and it supplies the tradition's central explanation for why human beings are mortal.