The Monster of Mtubu: III

***Marching on into the darkness...***

I fear when Montcliff returned to our camp I received him with some hysterics, and they could not conceive what I had seen. Again and again they asked me where the others were, even shook me to try and get some sense from my panic, until finally I calmed enough to look Montcliff straight in the eye and told him, “She ate them.”

I repeated myself a number of times before I found the composure to explain exactly what had happened. Of course, they did not believe me at first, convinced I had suffered some jungle dementia, perhaps even been bitten by one of the abnormal flies which they had seen. But once I had fully described the monster and its actions, Montcliff overcame his off-cuff denial to scout the area and confirmed with his tracking skills that some large animal had certainly come through here. Of course, this was patently obvious when you considered the nearby craters to be giant footprints, but without my saying so, he might never have noticed them. They were so large that a man could step inside one and not know it to be anything more than a dent in the ground. Her trampling the land had apparently even caused the wide paths we had encountered before, which she also followed away, so there was no particular change in the environment after her arrival at the shrine.

When finally given to believe me, Montcliff determined to give chase of this giant woman. We all urged him not to, however; not a single other fellow thought the idea sane. I don’t believe it struck any of them that there was hope for retrieving Barkley from her stomach, for he was surely dead by now, but Montcliff was keen to see this beast I had described. He said it would compare magnificently to even the greatest game that Africa has to offer: if he could tame, or kill, this giant, then he would have achieved more than any hunter alive.

By this stage in our discussions it was getting on to evening, and we were all resolved to camping for the night before making any further move. Reverend Yules decided that the shrine was perhaps more accurately a sacrificial chamber, and that the giant lady had come here for a reason, so we decided to move all our belongings away to a more discreet spot. We camped under the roots of a huge tree, effectively finding a wooden cave for ourselves. Into the night, three schools of opinion emerged amongst us: as Montcliff plotted to hunt the giant, Yules wondered at her relationship to the villagers of Lybl, and our guide Taylor protested that our best estimate would be to abandon all hope and leave at first light. Montclif’s remaining man, Red, was silently obedient to his master, preparing munitions with a grim face that showed hunting this woman was an inevitable duty of theirs, whilst the other guide, Hal, merely trembled in confused fear. For my part, I tried desperately to blot the image of Barkley’s demise from my mind. At one stage in Taylor’s protests, Montcliff snapped back at him that no one was leaving, for we could not navigate these jungles alone and he was determined to at least sight the monster. Taylor returned that no offer of gold could persuade him to stay, and a rather heated debate followed in which our hunter as good as threatened to put a bullet in the guide’s back if he attempted to leave.

“Besides,” Montcliff finished his threats, “Lord Spillerson and his people may yet be out there, hiding from this beast. We are yet to find their equipment and I very much doubt she ate that.”

So the night wound down, with tensions high and spirits low.

I was afraid that when I woke the next morning it would be to find that our camp had been deserted, but to the credit of all the expedition, no one had abandoned ship. Taylor, it seemed, genuinely believed Montcliff’s threats, but further I feel he accepted his responsibility to us, and was too noble a soul to leave us. Hal, it must be said, was by no means as competent a guide as Taylor, and it was for his additional language skills that he was enlisted; language skills that never really proved useful. I cannot fault his courage, though, for he despite his fear he made no effort to turn back.

We all rallied for another early rise, and Montcliff led the way from the shrine, following the markings of that massive female’s footprints. We marched in pairs, once again all armed, and I was gifted Smythe’s rifle, an old flintlock Baker. It would do well to note that aside from my Baker and Red’s Minié, (an infantryman’s gun) the main artillery of our group was Montcliff’s double-rifle, a splendid Holland and Holland device with two large barrels. This was a weapon he prided as capable of levelling elephants (from experience), yet even with this he was gravely realistic over our possibilities of felling such a lady as I had described. He had clearly given it much thought when he briefed us all: “If it is of the proportions that Watkins claims, then it will not do well to aim for the vital organs. If you can obtain a shot, aim for its eyes, as blinding it would be our most effective challenge. Of course, you would be at considerable risk to have that opportunity. Otherwise, I am not confident that any but my gun would penetrate far enough to damage such a beast, and I would not like to risk wasting shots that might alert it to our position. Our first goal should be to observe it unseen, so we might formulate a better plan of stopping it, but if we should be attacked the best option will be to aim for her feet, particularly the soles if she raises them high enough. A pinprick to the foot of any animal can cause a vital hindrance – this one should be no different, and though we might not fell it, this could aid our escape.”

His logical confidence was interesting to me, not least because he kept referring to the lady as “it”, or “the beast”. If he had seen her as I had, he would know her as more than the game he considered her to be.

As we walked, I found I had calmed somewhat from the terrors of the previous day, and was capable of discussing the events with Reverend Yules on some sensible level. He was eager to know more of the giant woman, especially with the signs of her intelligence, perhaps even culture. He asked me numerous times about her clothing, though I could not postulate how it might have been constructed, and eventually his questions grew graver, to address what had happened to Barkley. Though it was a grim subject, I must say there was an element of intrigue that we both drew from the concept of his demise. I told Yules of her almost dismissive attitude, and we decided that such activity must be commonplace for the lady, no doubt feasting off the sacrifices of the Lybl regularly. I told him how she had not shown any real interest in what must surely have been the exotic dress of Barkley, and indeed that she swallowed him fully clothed, and this formed our main contention to the question of her intelligence (aside, of course, from her wanton cannibalism). Of another great interest was her ability to swallow poor Barkley whole at all, for the size of her. I cannot readily imagine a Lady of Briton gulping down such a mouthful, akin to a large banana, without choking at least a little. Perhaps, we considered, along with her divergent skin tone to the locals, this was a species of person with untold differences to our own, beyond merely her great size.

It was an insightful and colourful debate, as we let the sheer horror of this monster subside into the fascination of its nature, but I must say much of what we theorised is not worth repeating, for my later discoveries shattered many of our ideas. At this stage in our journey, I feel Montcliff rather had the most rational perception of us all, as he told us, “It does not matter how you think its physiology may or may not be formed. When we find it, then we will find out how to kill it.”

We headed through the rainforest for two days with little rest, and seemed to be coming no closer to catching up to the monster. Then, as we ventured deeper into Mtubu, Taylor grew increasingly concerned. He said that there were things in the forest as dangerous as any giant, with a thousand ways to kill us without need of great height or strength, and we should turn back. However, aside from the occasional enlarged insect and the birds, we spotted no abnormal or dangerous creatures to speak of. Montcliff, one evening, grappled with a snake, but Hal and Taylor shared a laugh over this, insisting it was harmless.

On the third day, just as I was starting to sympathise with Taylor’s position and was considering it time we give up this search, we had a most troubling development. After the jungle floor developed into a steep incline through the morning, in the early afternoon our long hike up stopped with the treeline ending at a cliff-edge. The sight was glorious below, with inexplicably large trees stretching as far as the eye could see, but we were faced with a rocky descent almost two hundred feet high. The bottom, in fact, was hidden by the leaves of the trees below us, but a few of the nearby trees did reach almost as high as our platform. This was where the giant woman’s tracks had led us, so she must have descended the cliff, probably, I noted, with little more than a hop. This should have been the final obstacle necessary, for Taylor was in vicious refusal to climb down and my weary legs said our efforts had gone far enough. A perfect place to turn back.

Yet as we bickered childishly over our conquest, Red spotted the monster below, and we all froze to follow his pointing hand.