A Book of Giants
A Book of Giants is about a man in his youth who was so fond of giants that, not finding them large or
plentiful enough, he created a bounteous supply. He gave them precedence
of himself. In the frozen North they came even before the gods: in the East,
after the celestials but before the creation of the world; in Greece, they
sprang into being just after the Olympians and fiercely disputed the
sovereignty of Zeus.
Many ancient gods were vast in size: witness, for instance, the colossal
statues of Egypt, China, or the South Seas. But the palm for bigness must go
to those giant beings whom we find amid Chaos in the East: like that
Tiamat from whom the Babylonian god Bel formed heavens and earth; and
Purushu of the Hindu Vedas, whose severed head was sufficient for making
the sky, his feet for the earth, his eye for the sun, and his mind for the moon.
Somehow, these are too large; nowadays one can hardly digest a giant
like that. Even those huge and terrible beings with bodies of stone who once
descended upon the Iroquois Indians seem more like Djinn or Rakshasas:
they do not fascinate as does that monstrous black warder of the bridge at
Mantrible, who was fifteen feet tall with “tuskes like a bore” and head “like
a liberde.”
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