East and West -- Fiction; Giants -- Fiction; Science fiction
As we entered the foothills I became conscious for the first time of a
curious change. It was a psychological change in me, a change in my
sense of scale. We had been carried so long at Kazu's shoulder level,
and had grown so accustomed to looking out along his arms from almost
the same viewpoint as his, that we were now estimating the size of the
mountains as though we were as large as Kazu! It is difficult to express
just how I felt, and now that it is all over, the memory has become so
tenuous and subtle that I fear I will never be able to explain it so
that anyone but my three companions could understand. But this was the
first moment that I noticed the effect. The mountains were suddenly no
longer 4,000 foot peaks viewed from a plane 500 feet above ground level,
but were forty foot mounds with a six inch cover of mossy brush, and I
was walking up their sides as a normal human being! The change was, as
nearly as I can express it, from the viewpoint of a normal human being
under extraordinary circumstances to that of an ordinary man visiting a
miniature world. The whale to me was now a fat jellyfish seven inches
long, the Chinese warplanes were toys with an eight inch wingspread, the
little steamer of yesterday was a flimsy toy built of cardboard and
tinfoil. We had, in effect, identified ourselves completely with Kazu.
And so we climbed dripping from the Straits of Macassar, and entered the
mists and jungles of Borneo.
Our course toward Singapore carried us across the full width of
southern Borneo, a distance, from a point north of Kotabaroe to Cape
Datu, of almost six hundred miles.
After about an hour, the blue outlines of the Schwanner Mountains
appeared ahead and presently we passed quite close to Mt. Raya, which at
7,500 feet was the greatest mountain Kazu had ever seen. Then, dropping
into another valley, we followed the course of the Kapuas River for a
time, and finally turned west again through an area of plantations. Here
Kazu made an effort to secure food by plucking and eating fruit and
treetops together. The result was unsatisfactory, but presently we
came upon a granary containing thousands of sacks of rice. The
workmen, warned by our earthquake approach, fled long before we
reached it. Kazu carefully removed the corrugated iron roof and ate the
whole contents of the warehouse, which amounted to about a handful. The
sacks appeared about a quarter of an inch in length, and seemed to be
filled with a fine white powder.
Following this meal, Kazu drained a small lake, getting incidentally a
goodly catch of carp, although he could not even taste them. Then, since
it was now late in the afternoon, he turned northwest to the hills to
spend the night.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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