When I first cleared the treeline and saw the figure, I thought I was looking at a young Samburu boy, sitting bare-chested at the valley's edge, just a few yards away. On second glance, I thought I was seeing a grown man, a warrior, reclining on a rock a hundred feet from me, playing with some dolls and a tiny model village. By my third glance, I truly realized what I saw, and was dumbstruck. My spyglass trembled in my hands. The rumors of the bush-pilots were true.
What I had actually seen was an enormous, perfectly-proportioned man, sitting on a crag on the rift valley plain, thousands of feet below. His shadow fell over a riverside village, made miniscule in comparison to his huge size. He must have been over 100 feet tall. A genuine Gargantua.
As I drew nearer, I observed that the village was a hive of activity. Reeds were being woven into armour, branches stripped into spears. As I watched, great vats of hot dye were being trundled towards the giant, while others painted war-stripes on his chest with huge brushes. They hardly even acknowledged me (astonishing in itself, I know!) as I, a lone white man, strode into their camp.
I grabbed the arm of a man who looked like a tribal elder (as if anyone could hold much authority in the presence of a giant!) and I tried, in piggin dialect, to find out what was going on. When he skampered away, I accosted another villager, and then another. Eventually, I was able to piece together these scraps:
It seems that starting about 25 years ago, a spate of unusually large children were born, one or two per centum in every village along their isolated valley. (I will note that this date coincides neatly with a diamond mine being established upriver, which began dumping heavy water into the stream.) While most boys stopped growing when they reached manhood (as the good Lord intended), these Gargantuans continued to grow, exponentially, until they reached impossible size.
At first this was considered a holy blessing. This tribe named their own prized son Bokamba, meaning "Gift of God". But in time, as more and more such children arrived, the people grew fearful, as they ate proportional to their size, and the crops seemed to yield less every year (again I mention the diamond mine and the river). This year, resources were very tight...
And at that very moment, as I learned these things, their 25 year-old nephilim champion gave a colossal shout! The whole tribe began to march downstream. I rushed to keep up. As we rounded a bend, I saw other towering figures across the expansive plain, other war parties gathering like smoke around their feet...
In the screaming, savage Titanomachia that followed, I saw giants' skulls crushed with tree trunks fashioned into cudgels. Others slung boulders. One, a menacing figure streaked with dark mud, wielded the pale white thighbone of a long-dead foe. And all the while, the warriors dashed at each other between the ever-shifting legs. These the giants mowed down like grass.
In the end, the earth stopped quaking and the warcries ceased, and there I saw, standing alone in a lake of blood, the River Titan Bokamba.
... pfff. Right. Like that time you saw a hippogriff in Borneo--
That was a Chimaera! And it was Indo-China! Why, we had scarcely arrived at the hidden city of Angkor Wat, when...
(a short story for a short guy) | 
