THE DROWNED GIANT

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On the morning after the storm, the body of a drowned giant washed up on a beach five miles northwest of the city. News of its arrival was first reported by a nearby farmer and later confirmed by reporters from the local newspaper and the police. Still, most people, myself included, were skeptical, but our curiosity was finally piqued as more and more returning witnesses attested to the giant's enormous size. When we set off for the coast shortly after two o'clock, the library where my colleagues and I were conducting research was nearly empty. People walked out of offices and shops all day long, just because the giant's words kept circulating in the city.

When we reached the dunes above the beach, where a large crowd had gathered, we could see the bodies lying in shallow water two hundred yards away. Initial estimates of his size appear to be overstated. It was low tide and almost all of the giant's body was exposed, but he looked probably a little bigger than a basking shark. He lay on his back, arms by his sides, in a state of stillness, as if asleep in wet sand and shallow water, and as the tide receded, so did the reflections of his fair skin. In the clear sunlight, his body shone like the white feathers of a seabird.

My companions and I were puzzled by this spectacle and not content with watching from afar with everyone, so we walked down from the dunes to the beach. Everyone seemed reluctant to approach the giant, but half an hour later, two fishermen in wading boots walked across the sand. As their tiny figures approached the lying corpse, there was a sudden uproar among the spectators. These two men became complete dwarfs in the presence of giants. While his heels were partially buried in the sand, his feet were at least twice the height of the fisherman, and we immediately realized that this drowned behemoth should be the size and weight of the largest sperm whale.

Three fishing boats had arrived on the scene, their keels had been raised, and they had stopped a quarter mile from the shore, with the crew watching from the bow. Their prudence also discouraged spectators on the shore from wading through the sand. Everyone anxiously descended from the dunes and waited on the rocky beach, eager to get a closer look. The sand on the giant's side was washed away, forming a hollow, as if the giant had fallen from the sky. Two fishermen stood between the huge pillars formed by their feet, waving to us like tourists with water-patterned pillars in a temple on the Nile. For a moment, I feared that the giant was just asleep, and might suddenly turn his body over and bring his heels together, but his piercing eyes stared at the sky, ignoring the puny replicas beneath his feet.

The fishermen then began to circle the body, strolling past the long white legs. After pausing to examine the splayed fingers, they disappeared between the arms and the chest, and then reappeared, looking up at his ancient Greek-profiled face with the pergola in hand. The shallow forehead, high straight nose, and curled lips remind me of a Roman statue of Praxiteles, while the graceful contours of the nostrils reveal a resemblance to a monumental sculpture.

Suddenly there was a shout from the crowd, and a hundred arms pointed to the sea. I was startled to see a fisherman who had climbed onto the giant's chest and was now waving to the shore as he strolled. The clamor of surprise and victory came from the crowd, and was quickly drowned out by the roar of everyone rushing from the rocky beach to the sand.

As we approached the body lying in a court-sized pool, our excited conversations were silenced by the gigantic size of the dead giant. He is at a slight angle to the shore, with his legs close to the beach, a bias that belies his true length. Although two fishermen were already standing on his stomach, the crowd formed a large circle, in groups of three or four, advancing tentatively towards his hands and feet.

My companions and I rounded the giant's seaward side, his hips and chest jutting out before us like a stranded hull. His pearly skin swelled from the salt water, revealing vast outlines of muscles and tendons. We passed under his left knee, his knee slightly bent, wet seaweed clinging to his sides. A loosely woven scarf draped over the midsection, which had been bleached to pale yellow, and still had a slender texture. When transpired in the sun, the cloth carries a strong salty smell, mixed with the sweet and strong smell of the giant's skin.

We stopped by his shoulder and looked up at the motionless silhouette. The lips parted slightly, and the open eyes were cloudy and congested, as if infused with some sort of blue turbid fluid, but the delicate curvature of the nostrils and eyebrows gave the face a splendid charm that concealed what was hidden in the chest and shoulders. Brutal force.

The ear hangs in the air above our heads like a carved doorway. When I raised my hand to touch my drooping earlobe, someone emerged from the edge of my forehead and yelled at me. I was startled by the ghost, took a step back, and saw a group of young people had crawled up to their faces, shoving each other and spinning their eyes.

Now, people are crawling all over the giant, and his raised arms provide steps on both sides. They walked from the palms of the hands down the forearms to the elbows, then climbed over the hills of the biceps to the path of the pectoral muscles in the smooth, hairless upper thorax. From here they climbed to the face again, strolled hand in hand along the lips and nose, or descended from the belly to join those who had crossed their ankles and were circling their thighs.

We continued to weave through the crowd and stopped to examine the outstretched right hand. There was a small puddle of water in the palm of the hand, like the remnants of another world, now smashed by the people on the arm. I've tried to read the palm prints across the skin, looking for some clues to the giant's character, but the swelling of the tissue has all but obliterated them, taking away the giant's identity and all traces of his final tragic plight. The huge muscles and carpal bones in the hands seemed to deny their owners any sensitivity, but the delicate curves of the fingers and the nails, each meticulously trimmed to within six inches of the nail bed, showed that he had a certain delicacy that would attest to it. This is his face with the features of ancient Greece, and now on this face the townspeople are landing like flies.

A young man even stood on the tip of his nose, shaking his hands beside him, calling out to his companions, but the giant's face still maintained a heavy stillness.

Back on the shore, we sat down on the rocky beach and watched the people rushing in from the city. About half a dozen fishing boats gathered on the shore, their crews wading through shallow waters to take a closer look at the storm's huge catch. Later, a team of police appeared and they half-heartedly tried to seal off the beach, but after walking to the lying giant, the thought disappeared from their minds, and they left together with questioning eyes .

An hour later, a thousand people appeared on the beach, at least two hundred of them standing or sitting on the giant, squeezing along his arms and legs, or scrambling non-stop on his chest and stomach. A large group of young men occupied his head, bumping against each other on the cheeks, sliding off the smooth surface of the chin. Two or three people straddled their noses, and another climbed into one nostril and barked like a dog from there.

The police returned that afternoon, clearing the way for the university's scientific experts - the authority on gross anatomy and marine biology - to cut through the crowd. Most of the group of young men and giants crawled down, leaving only a few stubborn ones resting on their toes and foreheads. The police separated the crowd of onlookers in front to clear the way, and the experts walked around the giant, nodding their heads and engaging in heated consultations. As they approached the outstretched hand, the lead officer was about to bring them to the palm, but the experts hastily refused.

After they got back to the shore, the crowd climbed the giant again, and when we left at five, they had completely occupied the giant's body, covering their arms and legs.

Three days later, I went to that beach again. My friends at the library have returned to their jobs and have entrusted me with continuing to observe the giant and prepare a report. Maybe they sensed my special interest in this event, and I really wanted to go back to the beach. It's not necrophilia, but to me the giant is still alive and certainly more alive than many who observe him. Part of what drew me to him was his enormous size, the vast space occupied by his arms and legs that resembled my own miniature limbs, but above all the absolute fact of his existence. No matter what else is questionable about our lives, this giant, dead or alive, is absolutely there, giving a glimpse into a world that resembles this absolute, and we beach-goers just aren't perfect , a trivial replica.

When I got to the beach, the crowd dwindled significantly, and there were about two or three hundred people sitting on the beach, having a picnic while watching the crowds of tourists walking across the beach. Successive tides pushed the giant further ashore, swinging his head and shoulders toward the beach, so that he seemed to double in size, dwarfing the fishing boat at his feet. The uneven terrain of the beach pushed his spine into a slight arch, opened his chest and tilted his head back, forcing him into a more vivid heroic stance. The combined effect of the seawater immersion and tissue swelling made his face look rounder and less youthful. Although the giant features make it impossible to assess the age and character of this giant, on my last visit, his classic lips and nose indicated that he had been a discreet, unassuming young man. But now, he seems to be at least in early middle age. Puffy cheeks, thicker nose and temples, and narrowed eyes give him a pampered maturity that hints at the growing decay to come.

This accelerated posthumous personality development of the Giant continued to fascinate me, as if the underlying elements of his character had gained enough momentum throughout his life to be brought out in a brief final appearance. This marks the beginning of the giant's surrender to that demanding system of time, to which the rest of humanity is abiding, and of which our finite life, like the countless twisted ripples of a fragmented vortex, is the final product. I found my spot on the rocky beach directly across from the giant's head, from where I could see newcomers and children crawling over the giant's legs and arms.

Among the morning visitors were men in leather jackets and cloth caps, who surveyed the giant with professional eyes, pacing to name his measurements, making rough calculations on the sand with shards of driftwood. I'm guessing they're from the Department of Public Works and other municipal agencies, no doubt wondering what to do with this huge piece of junk.

Several well-dressed people, such as the circus owner, also appeared, and they walked slowly around the behemoth, their hands in the pockets of their long coats, not speaking to each other. It was obvious that the giant was too large even for them. After they were gone, the children continued to run up and down the giant's arms and legs, and the young men fought each other on the giant's face, and the sand tracks under their feet covered the white skin.

The next day, I deliberately postponed the visit to the evening, and when I arrived, there were less than fifty or sixty people sitting on the rocky beach. The giant was washed closer to the shore, now only about seventy-five yards away, his feet on the parapet of a rotten breakwater. The firmer sand slope of the shore tilted his body toward the sea, and the scarred face turned away in an almost conscious gesture of avoidance. I sat on a large metal winch chained to a concrete caisson on a rocky beach, looking down at the lying man.

His fair skin had lost its pearly translucency now, and it was strewn with dirty sand that should have been washed away by the nighttime tide. There were large patches of seaweed between the fingers, and a pile of rubbish and octopus in the crevices under the hips and knees. His features are still swollen, but despite this, the giant still maintains his magnificent Homeric stature. The huge width of the shoulders, and the huge pillar-like arms and legs, still take the figure into another dimension, and the giant seems more representative of the drowning Argonauts than the traditional human-sized portraits I had in mind before A true image of one of the heroes of the Odyssey.

I walked to the sand and walked towards the giant between the puddles. Two little boys sat in the pinna of the ears, and in the distance, a lone youth perched high on one toe, surveying me as I approached. As I had hoped when I delayed my arrival, no one else paid attention to me, and the people on the shore were still huddled under their coats.

The giant's supine right hand was covered with broken shells and sand, with dozens of footprints clearly visible. The round shape of the hips stood tall in front of me, blocking all my view of the sea. The sweet, greasy smell I had noticed before was now more pungent, and looking at the opaque skin, I could see the twists and turns of the coagulated blood vessels. No matter how repulsive it may seem, this endless metamorphosis, the life that lies within this visible death, finally gave me the courage to set foot on his body.

Using my raised thumb as a stair rail, I climbed onto my palm and started climbing. The skin is harder than I thought it would be, hardly affected by my weight. I quickly climbed up with sloping forearms and bulging biceps. The face of the drowning giant was approaching from my right, with empty nostrils and huge cheeks like some weird volcano.

Safely round my shoulders, I stepped out onto the broad pavement in front of my chest, where the ridges of my ribs straddled like giant rafters. The white skin was mottled with dark scars left by countless footprints, and in these scars, the pattern of each heel was clearly visible. Someone built a small sandcastle in the middle of the sternum, and I climbed onto this partially destroyed structure to get a better view of my face.

The two children have now climbed up their ears and are pulling themselves into the right eye socket, the right blue eyeball is completely filled with some turbid liquid, staring blankly through their miniature bodies. Looking diagonally from below, there was no grace or serenity in the face, the elongated mouth and the cocked chin supported by its enormous muscles, like the broken prow of a gigantic sunken ship. For the first time I was aware of the extreme pain this giant's body endured, but it was also distressing that he was unaware of the breakdown of muscles and tissues. The figure in ruins, like an abandoned ship thrown on the empty shore, the sound of the waves can hardly be heard, this absolute isolation turns his face into a look of exhaustion and helplessness mask.

As I walked forward, my feet sank into grooves in the soft tissue, and a foul-smelling gas blew out of the pores between my ribs. I withdrew from the foul air, the smells still hanging over me like clouds, and I turned to the sea for some fresh air. I was surprised to see that the giant's left hand had been chopped off.

I stared at the blackened stump in bewilderment, while the lonely youth leaned a hundred feet away, examining me with bloody eyes.

This is only the first in a series of looting. I spent the next two days in the library, reluctant to go to the beach for some reason, knowing that I might have witnessed a gorgeous hallucination about to end. The next time I stepped across the dunes and onto the rocky beach, the giant was no more than twenty yards away, and all the magic he had felt when he was washed by the waves from a distance was gone because he was so close to the rough pebbles. Clean and tidy. Despite his size, the scars and dirt covering him made him only vaguely human, and his enormous size only highlighted his vulnerability.

His right hand and foot were removed, dragged up a slope and dragged away in a car. After questioning the small group of people huddled by the breakwater, I knew it was a fertilizer company and a cattle food manufacturer.

The giant's surviving foot had been lifted into the air, with a steel anchor chain fastened to the big toe, apparently in preparation for the next day. Dozens of workers were hustling on the surrounding beaches, with deep ruts in the ground where hands and feet were being dragged. A stream of dark, salty water seeped from the stump, staining the sand and the white body of the cuttlefish. As I walked on the beach, I noticed playful slogans, swastikas, and other emblems carved into my gray skin, as if a repressed torrent of malice had suddenly flowed out of the mutilation of the motionless giant. out. The lobe of one of the ears was pierced by a wooden spear, and a small fire ignited in the center of the chest, blackening the surrounding skin. Tiny wood ash still fluttered in the wind.

A stench hung over the corpse, a sign of decay that could not hide, and it had finally driven away the young men who usually gathered here. I went back to the rocky beach and climbed on the winch. The giant's swollen cheeks now almost closed his eyes, and his lips were pulled back by a huge gap. The once-straight ancient Greek nose has been twisted and squashed, stomped into the swollen face by countless heels.

When I went to the beach the next day, I was almost relieved to find that his head had been sawed off.

It took a few weeks before I came to the beach again, when the figure I had seen before disappeared again. On closer inspection, the lying chest and belly are clearly human-like, but since every limb has been chopped off, first the knees and elbows, then the shoulders and thighs, the corpse resembles any headless marine animal - a whale or a whale shark corpse. With the loss of identity, and the few traces of personality on the corpse, audience interest has faded, save for an elderly beach ranger and a caretaker sitting at the door of a contractor's hut , the foreshore is deserted.

A loose wooden scaffolding was erected around the body from which a dozen ladders swayed in the wind, and the surrounding sand was littered with loops of rope, long metal-handled knives and grappling hooks, and pebbles smeared with blood and bones , fragments of skin.

I nodded to the caretaker, who looked at me dully by the burning coke fire. Large chunks of blubber were being boiled in the vat behind the hut, and there was a pungent smell all around.

Both thighbones were removed with the help of a small crane hung with the gauze-like fabric that once covered the giant's waist, the hollowed out socket joints open like a barn door. The upper arms, collarbones and genitals were also removed. The remaining skin on the chest and abdomen is divided into parallel strips with a tar brush, and the first five or six sections are shaved from the mid-belly to reveal the huge rib cage.

As I left, a flock of seagulls flew out of the air and stopped on the beach, pecking at the flesh-stained sand with a ferocious cry.

A few months later, when news of his appearance had been largely forgotten, various fragments of the giant's body began to reappear throughout the city. Most of what was seen were bones, presumably fertilizer manufacturers found them too difficult to crush, and immediately recognizable by their sheer size and the enormous discs of tendons and cartilage attached to the joints. For some reason, these disembodied stumps seem to convey the original majestic nature of giants better than their bloated, amputated bodies. When I looked at the front of the largest wholesaler in the meat market across the road, I recognized the two giant thigh bones on either side of the door. They towered high above the heads of the porters, like some kind of dangerous rock from primitive Druidism, and I suddenly saw giants rise from these bare bones and stride across the streets of the town, in On the way back to the sea, he picked up his lost fragments.

A few days later, I saw the humerus of my left hand placed at the entrance of a shipyard (its twin had been in the dirt next to the pile foundation below the main commercial pier in the port for several years). In the same week, the mummified right hand was displayed on a carnival float at the guild's annual celebration.

The mandible, unsurprisingly, was sent to the Natural History Museum. The rest of the skull has disappeared, but may still be lurking in the ruins of the city or in private gardens - recently, while sailing down the river, I noticed the giant's two ribs were placed as a decoration in the waterside garden The sexual arch may have been taken as the jawbone of a whale. A large patch of skin the size of an Indian blanket, tanned and tattooed, became the backdrop for dolls and masks in a novelty store near the amusement park, and I have no doubt that, in other parts of the city, in Hotels or golf clubs where mummified noses or ears of giants hang on the wall above the fireplace. As for the giant genitalia, it ended up in the hands of the Museum of Curious Circus, a small circus that tours non-stop along the northwest coast. The once majestic organ occupies an exclusive tent of its own due to its insane size. Ironically, the label misstated the source as a whale, in fact most people, even those who were the first to see him washed ashore after the storm, remember him now as just a giant head sea ​​beast.

The skeleton that had been stripped of all its flesh still stood by the sea, its pale ribs disorganized like the wood of a hulk. The contractor's hut, cranes and scaffolding have been removed, and sand washed into the bay along the coast has buried pelvises and skeletons. In winter, these tall, crooked bones are deserted, beaten only by the waves, but in summer they provide an excellent habitat for sea-weary seagulls.