The giant had to climb slowly, as the air was thick with smoke and he could neither see nor breath very well. The hill was thick with scrubby brush and prickly trees. Several times he stumbled and slid back down the loose stone underfoot. Once he nearly lost his precious satchel filled with the gold and treasures from his hometown, as he had to quickly regain his balance on an outcropping of jagged rock. After a long climb the smoke from the ruins below began to clear and he could breathe a little better. The slow tolling of the bell seemed to get no closer as he climbed, but pealed persistently, a low, long droning note rolling down the hills and echoing in the valley below. The giant came to a spot in the hillside that was not too steep, and sat down for minute to catch his breath. He surveyed the valley from his lofted perch and pondered the destruction below.
The town looked much worse from above, the total devastation revealed in one panorama. He could see the flattened fences and burnt and broken buildings as they smoldered in a cloud of grey smoke. It was hard for him to imagine what could have caused such total destruction. Maybe the town folk were roasting up a bunch of meats for a feast of their own when the fires got out of control. That would certainly explain the lack of livestock, but where were all the people? Surely some of them could have made their way to safety amid the conflagration. And why had the fields been harvested completely in the middle of the season? The giant wearily stood, gathered up his satchel and coat, and continued his ascent.
As he neared the crest of the hill he could hear the low bell more clearly. It was so low that when it rang it shook the ground and the leaves of the trees trembled a little. The giant had been looking down at the precarious footing so as not to stumble. When he finally reached the crest he looked up and saw the most amazing thing he had ever seen in all his days. A bell tower stood towering over him, so tall that he could barely see to the top. The bell tolling in the tower was so high up that it almost disappeared into the clear morning sky. Birds flying above would seem to need to navigate around it so high did it rise. The giant stood in slack-jawed astonishment, unable to conceive of how such a structure could even exist. In his humble town his own home was known to be a landmark for miles around, as it dwarfed all nearby buildings by a comical factor, but this thing was positively enormous!
He finally crested the hill and came to view the rest of the building attached to the bell tower. He sat down and stared in total wonder. The building was as impossibly large as the bell tower was unbelievably tall! It filled the valley completely, stretching out from hillside to hillside and outward to the left and right beyond his vision. The peaks of the roof were level with tops of the hillside and chimneys of the many fireplaces reached up further, wafting smoke into the midday sky.
Now, the giant had seen a lot of things in his day. Being a giant means you usually have pretty good view of anything you care to regard, but this was hard for him to take in. As he struggled to understand what he was seeing, he heard a sound coming from down the valley. It was much different from the tolling of bell tower high above, more like a low whooshing sound. He turned around just in time to see the second most amazing thing he had ever seen. A dog was running up the valley. The biggest dog he had ever seen! It looked like a normal sized dog until he realized that it was still about a mile away. As the dog clambered up the valley and hillside towards him the giant began to feel something he had never felt in his entire gigantic and long life. He was afraid.
