The Mountain

"‘You know they worship it, the Mountain,’ said Marcel one evening. Anton had been woken up that morning by a monstrous Coconut Crab that had invaded his tent, its central body mass larger than a football, its limbs monstrously long; Marcel’s wife had corralled it with a cast-iron frypan and Marcel had cooked it for dinner that night.

‘Really?’ Anton responded. The night was warm with a wind rising and he was feeling cosy and well-fed; he was wondering whether to try walking back to his sleeping bag, or if he could just crash there, stretched out on one of Marcel’s tables.

‘Bien sur,’ said Marcel, ‘to them it is a god; they are its people. Great Yasur, it owns them, and they live at its pleasure.’ He topped up Anton’s cognac. Anton wondered at the veracity of Marcel’s statement, but then the chef had married one of the local women, lived among these people; perhaps it was true. Marcel’s wife didn’t speak much, content to scowl at them from the kitchen where she washed the pots and pans. Her tinny cassette player warbled out from behind the louvered glassless windows, some American tune that he dimly recalled from decades ago...

Later that night in his tent, the Mountain rumbled and seethed and strode mightily through his dreams..."