Ballard, J G - Drowned Giant

VIP免费

2024-12-24 0 0 96.93KB 7 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

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

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

Withitscool,detachedstyleanditsdisturbingimages,thisstoryisasmysteriouslycompellingasKafka'sMetamorphosis,andIthinkitmayberememberedaslong.THEDROWNEDGIANTJ.G.BallardOnthemorningafterthestormthebodyofadrownedgiantwaswashedashoreonthebeachfivemilestothenorthwestofthecity.Thefirstnewsofitsarrivalwasbro...

展开>> 收起<<

Ballard, J G - Drowned Giant.pdf

共7页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Ballard, J G - Drowned Giant

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: