With its cool, detached style and its disturbing images, this
story is as mysteriously compelling as Kafka's Metamorphosis,
and I think it may be remembered as long.

THE DROWNED GIANT

J.G.Ballard
On the morning after the storm the body of a drowned giant
was washed ashore on the beach five miles to the northwest of
the city. The first news of its arrival was brought by a nearby
farmer and subsequently confirmed by the local newspaper
reporters and the police. Despite this the majority of people,
myself among them, remained skeptical, but the return of more
and more eyewitnesses attesting to the vast size of the giant
was finally too much for our curiosity. The library where my
colleagues and I were carrying out our research was almost
deserted when we set off for the coast shortly after two o'clock,
and throughout the day people continued to leave their offices
and shops as accounts of the giant circulated around the city.
By the time we reached the dunes above the beach a
substantial crowd had gathered, and we could see the body
lying in the shallow water 200 yards away. At first the
estimates of its size seemed greatly exaggerated. It was then at
low tide, and almost all the giant's body was exposed, but he
appeared to be a little larger than a basking shark. He lay on his
back with his arms at his sides, in an attitude of repose, as if
asleep on the mirror of wet sand, the reflection of his blanched
skin fading as the water receded. In the clear sunlight his body
glistened like the white plumage of a sea bird.
Puzzled by this spectacle, and dissatisfied with the matter-
of-fact explanations of the crowd, my friends and I stepped
down from the dunes onto the shingle. Everyone seemed
reluctant to approach the giant, but half an hour later two
fishermen in wading boots walked out across the sand. As their
diminutive figures neared the recumbent body a sudden
hubbub of conversation broke out among the spectators. The
two men were completely dwarfed by the giant. Although his
heels were partly submerged in the sand, the feet rose to at least
twice the fishermen's height, and we immediately realized that
this drowned leviathan had the mass and dimensions of the
largest sperm whale.
Three fishing smacks had arrived on the scene and with keels
raised remained a quarter of a mile offshore,  the crews
watching from the bows. Their discretion deterred the spec-
tators on the shore from wading out across the sand. Impa-
tiently everyone stepped down from the dunes and waited
on the shingle slopes, eager for a closer view. Around the
margins of the figure the sand had been washed away, forming
a hollow, as if the giant had fallen out of the sky. The two
fishermen were standing between the immense plinths of the
feet, waving to us like tourists among the columns of some
water-lapped temple on the Nile. For a moment I feared that
the giant was merely asleep and might suddenly stir and clap
his heels together, but his glazed eyes stared skyward, unaware
of the minuscule replicas of himself between his feet.
The fishermen then began a circuit of the corpse, strolling
past the long white flanks of the legs. After a pause to examine
the fingers of the supine hand, they disappeared from sight
between the arm and chest, then re-emerged to survey the
head, shielding their eyes as they gazed up at its Grecian
profile. The shallow forehead, straight high-bridged nose, and
curling lips reminded me of a Roman copy of Praxiteles, and
the elegantly formed cartouches of the nostrils emphasized the
resemblance to sculpture.
Abruptly there was a shout from the crowd, and a hundred
arms pointed toward the sea. With a start I saw that one of the
fishermen had climbed onto the giant's chest and was now
strolling about and signaling to the shore. There was a roar of
surprise and triumph from the crowd, lost in a rushing ava-
lanche of shingle as everyone surged forward across the sand.
As we approached the recumbent figure, which was lying in
a pool of water the size of a field, our excited 'chatter fell away
again, subdued by the huge physical dimensions of this dead
colossus. He was stretched out at a slight angle to the shore, his
legs carried nearer the beach, and this foreshortening had-
disguised his true length. Despite the two fishermen standing
on his abdomen, the crowd formed itself into a wide circle,
groups of people tentatively advancing toward the hands and
feet.
My companions and I walked around the seaward side of the
giant, whose hips and thorax towered above us like the hull of a
stranded ship. His pearl-colored skin, distended by immersion in
salt water, masked the contours of the enormous muscles and
tendons. We passed below the left knee, which was flexed
slightly, threads of damp seaweed clinging to its sides. Draped
loosely across the midriff, and preserving a tenuous propriety,
was a shawl of heavy open-weave material, bleached to a pale
 yellow by the water. A strong odor of brine came from the
garment as it steamed in the sun, mingled with the sweet,
potent scent of the giant's skin.
We stopped by his shoulder and gazed up at the motionless
profile. The lips were parted slightly, the open eye cloudy and
occluded, as if injected with some blue milky liquid, but the
delicate arches of the nostrils and eyebrows invested the face
with an ornate charm that belied the brutish power of the chest
and shoulders.
The ear was suspended in mid-air over our heads like a
sculptured doorway. As I raised my hand to touch the
pendulous lobe, someone appeared over the edge of the
forehead and shouted down at me. Startled by this apparition, I
stepped back, and then saw that a group of youths had climbed
up onto the face and were jostling each other in and out of
the orbits.
People were now clambering all over the giant, whose
reclining arms provided a double stairway. From the palms
they walked along the forearms to the elbows and then crawled
over the distended belly of the biceps to the flat promenade of
the pectoral muscles which covered the upper half of the
smooth hairless chest. From here they climbed up onto the face,
hand over hand along the lips and nose, or forayed down the
abdomen to meet others who had straddled the ankles and were
patrolling the twin columns of the thighs.
We continued our circuit through the crowd, and stopped to
examine the outstretched right hand. A small pool of water lay
in the palm, like the residue of another world, now being kicked
away by people ascending the arm. I tried to read the palmlines
that grooved the skin, searching for some clue to the giant's
character,  but  the  distention  of  the  tissues  had  almost
obliterated them, carrying away all trace of the giant's identity
and his last tragic predicament. The huge muscles and
wristbones of the hand seemed to deny any sensitivity to their
owner, but the delicate flexion of the fingers and the well-
tended nails, each cut symmetrically to within six inches of the
quick, argued refinement of temperament, illustrated in the
Grecian features of the face, on which the townsfolk were now
sitting like flies.
One youth was even standing, arms wavering at his side, on
the very tip of the nose, shouting down at his companions, but
the face of the giant still retained its massive composure.
Returning to the shore, we sat down on the shingle and
watched the continuous stream of people arriving from the city.
Some six or seven fishing boats had collected offshore, and their
crews waded in through the shallow water for a closer look at
this enormous storm catch. Later a party of police appeared
and made a halfhearted attempt to cordon off the beach, but
after walking up to the recumbent figure, any such thoughts
left their  minds,  and they went  off together with bemused
backward glances.
An hour later there were a thousand people present on the
beach, at least two hundred of them standing or sitting on the
giant, crowded along the arms and legs or circulating in a
ceaseless melee across his chest and stomach. A large gang of
youths occupied the head, toppling each other off the cheeks
and sliding down the smooth planes of the jaw. Two or three
straddled the nose, and another crawled into one of the nostrils,
from which he emitted barking noises like a demented dog.
That afternoon the police returned and cleared a way
through the crowd for a party of scientific expertsauthorities
on gross anatomy and marine biologyfrom the university.
The gang of youths and most of the people on the giant
climbed down, leaving behind a few hardy spirits perched on
the tips of the toes and on the forehead. The experts strode
around the giant, heads nodding in vigorous consultation, pre-
ceded by the policemen who pushed back the press of specta-
tors.  When they  reached the  outstretched hand the senior
officer offered to assist them up onto the palm, but the experts
hastily demurred.
After they returned to the shore, the crowd once more
climbed onto the giant, and was in full possession when we left
at five o'clock, covering the arms and legs like a dense flock of
gulls sitting on the corpse of a large fish.
I next visited the beach three days later. My friends at the
library had returned to their work, and delegated to me the task
of keeping the giant under observation and preparing a report.
Perhaps they sensed my particular interest in the case, and it
was certainly true that I was eager to return to the beach. There
was nothing necrophilic about this, for to all intents the giant
was still alive for me, indeed more alive than many of the
people watching him. What I found so fascinating was partly
his immense scale, the huge volumes of space occupied by his
arms and legs, which seemed to confirm the identity of my own
miniature limbs, but above all, the mere categorical fact of his
existence. Whatever else in our lives might be open to doubt,
the giant, dead or alive, existed in an absolute sense, providing
a glimpse into a world of similar absolutes of which we spec-
tators on the beach were such imperfect and puny copies.
When I arrived at the beach the crowd was considerably
smaller, and some two or three hundred people sat on the
shingle, picnicking and watching the groups of visitors who
walked out across the sand. The successive tides had carried
the giant nearer the shore, swinging his head and shoulders
toward the beach, so that he seemed doubly to gain in size, his
huge body dwarfing the fishing boats beached beside his feet.
The uneven contours of the beach had pushed his spine into a
slight arch, expanding his chest and tilling back the head,
forcing him into a more expressly heroic posture. The combined
effects of sea water and the tumefaction of the tissues had given
the face a sleeker and less youthful look. Although the vast
proportions of the features made it impossible to assess the age
and character of the giant, on my previous visit his classically
modeled mouth and nose suggested that he had been a young
man of discreet and modest temper. Now, however, he
appeared to be at least in early middle age. The puffy cheeks,
thicker nose and temples, and narrowing eyes gave him a look
of well-fed maturity that even now hinted at a growing corrup-
tion to come.
The accelerated post-mortem development of the giant's
character, as if the latent elements of his personality had gained
sufficient momentum during his life to discharge themselves in a
brief final resume, continued to fascinate me. It marked the
beginning of the giant's surrender to that all-demanding system
of time in which the rest of humanity finds itself, and of which,
like the million twisted ripples of a fragmented whirlpool, our
finite lives are the concluding products. I took up my position
on the shingle directly opposite the giant's head, from where I
could see the new arrivals and the children clambering over the
legs arid arms.
Among the morning's visitors were a number of men in
leather jackets and cloth caps, who peered up critically at the
giant with a professional eye, pacing out his dimensions and
making rough calculations in the sand with spars of driftwood.
I assumed them to be from the public works department and
other municipal bodies, no doubt wondering how to dispose of
this monster.
Several  rather more smartly  attired individuals,  circus
proprietors and the like, also appeared on the scene, and
strolled slowly around the giant, hands in pockets of their long
overcoats, saying nothing to one another. Evidently its bulk
was too great even for their matchless enterprise. After they
had gone the children continued to run up and down the arms
and legs, and the youths wrestled with each other over the
supine face, the damp sand from their feet covering the white
skin.
The following day I deliberately postponed my visit until
the late afternoon, and when I arrived there were fewer than
50 or 60 people sitting on the shingle. The giant had been
carried still closer to the shore, and was now little more than 75
yards away, his feet crushing the palisade of a rotting break-
water. The slope of the firmer sand tilted his body toward
sea, the bruised swollen face averted in an almost conscious
gesture. I sat down on a large metal winch which had been
shackled to a concrete caisson above the shingle, and looked
down at the recumbent figure.
His blanched skin had now lost its pearly translucence and
was spattered with dirty sand which replaced that washed
away by the night tide. Clumps of seaweed filled the intervals
between the fingers and a collection of litter and cuttlebones
lay in the crevices below the hips and knees. But despite this,
and the continuous thickening of his features, the giant still
retained his  magnificent  Homeric  stature.  The  enormous
breadth of the shoulders, and the huge columns of the arms and
legs, still carried the figure into another dimension, and the
giant seemed a more authentic image of one of the drowned
Argonauts or heroes of the Odyssey than the conventional
portrait previously in my mind.
I stepped down onto the sand, and walked between the pools
of water toward the giant. Two small boys were sitting in the
well of the ear, and at the far end a solitary youth stood perched
high on one of the toes, surveying me as I approached. As I
had hoped when delaying my visit, no one else paid any atten-
tion to me, and the people on the shore remained huddled
beneath their coats.
The giant's supine right hand was covered with broken shells
and sand, in which a score of footprints were visible. The
rounded bulk of the hip lowered above me, cutting off all sight
of the sea. The sweetly acrid odor I had noticed before was now
more pungent, and through the opaque skin I could see the
serpentine coils of congealed blood vessels. However repellent
it  seemed,  this  ceaseless  metamorphosis,  a  macabre  life-in-
death, alone permitted me to set foot on the corpse.
Using the jutting thumb as a stair rail, I climbed up onto the
palm and began my ascent. The skin was harder than I
expected, barely yielding to my weight. Quickly I walked up
the sloping forearm and the bulging balloon of the biceps. The
face of the drowned giant loomed to my right, the cavernous
nostrils and huge flanks of the cheeks like the cone of some
freakish volcano.
Safely rounding the shoulder, I stepped out onto the broad
promenade of the chest, across which the bony ridges of the
rib cage lay like huge rafters. The white skin was dappled by
the darkening bruises of countless footprints, in which the
patterns of individual heel marks were clearly visible. Someone
had built a small sand castle on the center of the sternum, and
I climbed onto this partly demolished structure to get a better
view of the face.
The two children had now scaled the ear and were pulling
themselves into the right orbit, whose blue globe, completely
occluded by some milk-colored fluid, gazed sightlessly past
their miniature forms. Seen obliquely from below, the face was
devoid of all grace and repose, the drawn mouth and raised
chin propped up by gigantic slings of muscles resembling the
torn prow of a colossal wreck. For the first time I became aware
of the extremity of this last physical agony of the giant, no less
painful for his unawareness of the collapsing musculature and
tissues. The absolute isolation of the ruined figure, cast like an
abandoned ship upon the empty shore, almost out of sound of
the waves, transformed his face into a mask of exhaustion and
helplessness.
As I stepped forward, my foot sank into a trough of soft
tissue, and a gust of fetid gas blew through an aperture be-
tween the ribs. Retreating from the fouled air, which hung like
a cloud over my head, I turned toward the sea to clear my
lungs. To my surprise I saw the the giant's left hand had been
amputated.
I  stared with  shocked bewilderment  at the blackening
stump, while the solitary youth reclining on his aerial perch a
hundred feet away surveyed me with a sanguinary eye.
This was only the first of a sequence of depredations. I spent
the following two days in the library, for some reason reluctant
to visit the shore, aware that I had probably witnessed the
approaching end of a magnificent illusion. When I next crossed
the dunes and set foot on the shingle, the giant was little more
than 20 yards away, and with this close proximity to the rough
pebbles all traces had vanished of the magic which once
surrounded his distant wave-washed form. Despite his immense
size, the bruises and dirt that covered his body made him
appear merely human in scale, his vast dimensions only increas-
ing his vulnerability.
His right hand and foot had been removed, dragged up the
slope, and trundled away by cart. After questioning the small
group of people huddled by the breakwater, I gathered that a
fertilizer company and a cattle-food manufacturer were re-
sponsible.
The giant's remaining foot rose into the air, a steel hawser
fixed to the large toe, evidently in preparation for the following
day. The surrounding beach had been disturbed by a score of
workmen, and deep ruts marked the ground where the hands
and foot had been hauled away. A dark brackish fluid leaked
from the stumps, and stained the sand and the white cones of
the cuttlefish. As I walked down the shingle I noticed that a
number of jocular slogans, swastikas, and other signs had been
cut into the gray skin, as if the mutilation of this motionless
colossus had released a sudden flood of repressed spite. The
lobe of one of the ears was pierced by a spear of timber, and a
small fire had burned out in the center of the chest, blackening
the surrounding skin. The fine wood ash was still being scat-
tered by the wind.
A foul smell enveloped the cadaver, the undisguisable
signature of putrefaction, which had at last driven away the
usual gathering of youths. I returned to the shingle ad climbed
up onto the winch. The giant's swollen cheeks had now almost
closed his eyes, drawing the lips back in a monumental gape.
The once straight Grecian nose had been twisted and flattened,
stamped into the ballooning face by countless heels.
When I visited the beach the following day I found, almost
with relief, that the head had been removed.
Some weeks elapsed before I made my next journey to the
beach, and by then the human likeness I had noticed earlier
had vanished again. On close inspection the recumbent thorax
and abdomen were unmistakably manlike, but as each of the
limbs was chopped off, first at the knee and elbow, and then at
shoulder and thigh, the carcass resembled that of any headless
sea animalwhale or whale shark. With this loss of identity,
and the few traces of personality that had clung tenuously to
the figure, the interest of the spectators expired, and the fore-
shore was deserted except for an elderly beachcomber and the
watchman sitting in the doorway of the contractor's hut.
A loose wooden scaffolding had been erected around the
carcass, from which a dozen ladders swung in the wind, and
the surrounding sand was littered with coils of rope, long
metal-handled knives, and grappling irons, the pebbles oily with
blood and pieces of bone and skin.
I nodded to the watchman, who regarded me dourly over his
brazier of burning coke. The whole area was pervaded by the
pungent smell of huge squares of blubber being simmered in a
vat behind the hut.
Both the thighbones had been removed, with the assistance
of a small crane draped in the gauzelike fabric which had once
covered the waist of the giant, and the open sockets gaped like
barn doors. The upper arms, collarbones, ?nd pudenda had
likewise been dispatched. What remained of the skin over the
thorax and abdomen had been marked out in parallel strips
with a tarbrush, and the first five or six sections had been pared
away from the midriff, revealing the great arch of the rib cage.
As I left, a flock of gulls wheeled down from the sky and
alighted on the beach, picking at the stained sand with
ferocious cries.
Several months later, when the news of his arrival had been
generally forgotten, various pieces of the body of the dismem-
bered giant began to reappear all over the city. Most of
these were bones, which the fertilizer manufacturers had found
too difficult to crush, and their massive' size, and the huge
tendons  and  dhcs  of cartilage  attached to their joints,
immediately identified them. For some reason, these disem-
bodied fragments seemed better to convey the essence of
the giant's original magnificence than the bloated appendages
that had been subsequently amputated. As I looked across the
road at the premises of the largest wholesale merchants in the
meat market, I recognized the two enormous thighbones on
either side of the doorway. They lowered over the porters'
heads like the threatening megaliths of some primitive druidical
religion, and I had a sudden vision of the giant climbing to his
knees upon these bare bones and striding away through the
streets of the city, picking up the  scattered fragments of
himself on his return journey to the sea.
A few days later I saw the left humerus lying in the entrance
to one of the shipyards. In the same week the mummified right
hand was exhibited on a carnival float during the annual
pageant of the guilds.
The lower jaw, typically, found its way to the museum of
natural history. The remainder of the skull has disappeared,
but is probably still lurking in the waste grounds or private
gardens of the cityquite recently, while sailing down the river,
I noticed two ribs of the giant forming a decorative arch in a
waterside garden, possibly confused with the jawbones of a
whale. A large square of tanned and tattooed skin, the size of
an Indian blanket, forms a back cloth to the dolls and masks in
a novelty shop near the amusement park, and I have no doubt
that elsewhere in the city, in the hotels or golf clubs, the
mummified nose or ears of the giant hang from the wall above
a fireplace. As for the immense pizzle, this ends its days in the
freak museum of a circus which travels up and down the
northwest.  This  monumental  apparatus,  stunning  in  its
proportions and sometime potency, occupies a complete booth
to itself. The irony is that it is wrongly identified as that of a
whale, and indeed most people, even those who first saw him
cast up on the shore after the storm, now remember the giant, if
at all, as a large sea beast.
The remainder of the skeleton, stripped of all flesh, still rests
on the seashore, the clutter of bleached ribs like the timbers of
a derelict ship. The contractor's hut, the crane and scaffolding
have been removed, and the sand being driven into the bay
along the coast has buried the pelvis and backbone. In the
winter the high curved bones are deserted, battered by the
breaking waves, but in the summer they provide an excellent
perch for the sea-wearying gulls.