[theme music playing]
[man on radio] ...is closed permanently. We've known that for some time now.
[seagulls squawking]
[man narrating] There had been a big storm the night before.
And so, it was late morning before the town heard the first news
of the arrival after it had been spotted by local fishermen.
[indistinct chatter]
Being scientists, my colleagues and I, of course, discounted the first reports
as exaggerations or a trick of the light.
But as ever more eyewitnesses returned from the beach,
we finally decided to investigate for ourselves.
Come on, then, Steven. No time to waste gawking.
Right behind you.
[indistinct chatter]
[man] He must displace at least 60 tons.
[woman] I'd say closer to 80. The bones alone must weigh 30 tons.
[Steven] The vast proportions of his features
made it impossible to assess the age of the giant,
but his classically modeled mouth and nose
suggest he had been a young man of discreet and modest temper.
[waves crashing]
It was a noble face, possessed of an ornate charm
that belied the brutish power of the giant's physique.
His magnificent Homeric stature
offered a more authentic example of a drownedArgonaut
or a hero from The Odyssey
than the conventional human-sized portraitspreviously in my mind.
What I found so fascinating was partly his immense scale, of course,
but above all, it was simply the categorical fact of his existence.
Whatever else in our lives might be open to doubt,
this giant existed in an absolute sense...
providing us a glimpse into a world of similar absolutes
in which we spectators on the beach were such imperfect and puny copies.
Say, look over there.
[cheering]
Who is that? Come on.
[woman 1] Oh, it's rubbery.
- [woman 2] How is it up there? - [laughing]
[woman 2] Is it funny?
Teddy, you bastard, I nearly fell.
You looked so scared.
From a distance, it looked as if he was merely asleep
and could, at any moment, clap his heels together
and crush the miniscule replicas of himself that swarmed around him.
But as time passed,
the magical spell cast by the giant began to dissipate.
We'd best get back to town. It'll be dark soon.
Yeah. I suppose you're right.
[crowd cheering]
Three days passed before my next visit to the beach.
Sensing a particular interest in the giant,
my associates at the institute delegated the task
of keeping the giant under observation to me.
There was nothing morbid about this because, for all intents,
the giant was still alive for me.
Indeed, more alive than many of the people around me.
[barks]
[laughing]
[screams]
[worker 1] No, it's not. This bastard's big.
If the butchers start here, we can soon get access to the thigh bone.
And we can work our way up to the hip.
[worker 2] Going to be some overtime, getting this done.
[Steven] The following day,
I deliberately postponed my visit until late afternoon,
hoping that I'd find fewer people on the beach.
Prolonged immersion in seawater and the tumefaction of his tissues
had given the face a less youthful look.
His features now had an appearance of well-fed maturity,
hinting at the growing corruption to come.
[seagulls squawking]
This was the beginning of his surrender to that all-demanding system of time,
in which the rest of humanity found itself.
However repellent it may seem,
this ceaseless metamorphosis, this visible life-in-death,
is what gave me the courage to finally set foot on his corpse.
[dramatic music playing]
This new perspective made me more aware of the last physical agonies of the giant.
No less painful for his unawareness of them.
In the end, his face had been transformed
into a mask of exhaustion and helplessness.
Caught in that same twisting whirlpool
for which all our finite lives are destined.
And his suffering was made all the more tragic by the isolation
in which he endured it.
Cast like an abandoned ship upon the empty shore.
The amputation was but the first of a series of depredations.
Two days had passed,
while I struggled to overcome my reluctance
to witness the end of this magnificent illusion.
Despite his immense size,
these insults to the giant's body made him appear more human to me.
More vulnerable.
But that weakness has released a sudden flood of repressed spite,
encouraging the mutilation of the colossus by the tiny creatures around it.
When I visited the beach the following day,
I found, almost with relief, that the head had been removed.
Some weeks had lapsed before my next journey to the beach.
And by then, any human likeness held by the giant had vanished.
Evening, mate.
And with the loss of those few remaining traces of personality
that had clung tenuously to the figure,
the interest of the spectators had, at last, expired.
Months later, after the giant's arrival had been generally forgotten,
various pieces of the body began to reappear around town.
Most of those remains were bones.
These mighty yet disembodied fragments seem to better convey the essence
of the giant's magnificence
than my last memories of his bloated appendages.
[engine revs]
[dramatic music playing]
I have no doubt that if I search the town's pubs,
hotels, and eateries, I'd also find the mummified nose or ears of the giant
hanging on walls and fireplaces.
[male attendant] Tickets, get them here!
Oi! Get out of here. You wanna look, you pay for it.
As for the immense pizzle,
this ends its days in the freak museum of a small circus,
which travels up and down the northwest coast.
That monumental apparatus,
stunning in its proportions and once potency,
occupies a complete tent to itself,
though, sadly, it is mislabeled as belonging to a whale.
Even those who came and saw the giant after the storm now remember him,
if at all, as merely a large sea beast.
But the giant is still alive for me.
I often dream of his resurrection.
A colossus striding through the streets of town,
picking up the fragments of himself on his return journey to the sea.
[dramatic music playing]