Adventures to the Third Hill

Adventures to the Third Hill

An Adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels

“I heartily hate and detest that animal called man”
Jonathan Swift

Gulliver left his country on a ship to see the land of mystics and magic and to enjoy the adventures of the world that awaited him. Long ago, two captains of The Umbu (name of the ship) set sail on an adventure. Gulliver was one of the two captains. The other was Sir Daniel, the finest sailor in the land. They were good friends, Gulliver and Sir Daniel. They used to talk to each other, eat lunch together and listen to music on the deck of their ship. The Umbu crossed numerous seas and oceans and the journey from and back to England was marked every time with celebration. This time just a few hundred nautical miles from the western coasts of the Indian subcontinent Sir Daniel lost control of the ship. A strong storm hit the travelers and Gulliver was washed aboard by the violent waves rising out of the water. Sir Daniel could do nothing about it. The Umbu was stuck in the storm for days and Gulliver was swept aside by the waves to a very strange island called Liliput.

A family standing on a tiny hill was watching the storm stir up the ocean but to them it was just a dot in the landscape. Audible sound of crashing waves and thunder in the clouds were actually signaling Mumma, Papa and the little baby to take shelter. Their house was lit with faint lamps behind the lawn. They soon went indoors. In the neighborhood there were several other houses, all belonging to people just like them. They thought the sky was clear above them but the pace in the wind had started to rise. At the peak of the hill a castle of the king and the queen stood. The flag of the Kingdom of Liliput fluttered at the castle wall.

Inside their house Mumma and Papa were looking after their pet birds. The little baby was playing on the ground. Suddenly the little baby started to trouble its parents. They took a hint and knew immediately that the baby wanted to play with them. Mumma picked her up in her arms and Papa began playing pikaboo. He hid his face and then revealed it to the baby with surprise. He did that again and again. One could see that the baby was enjoying the game of pikaboo all too much.

Suddenly there was a loud bang outside, a sound that nearly made them deaf in their ears. Mumma, Papa and the little baby got so scared that they didn’t know what to do. Mumma tried to calm the baby down and Papa went near the window to see what had happened. From the window he saw a big cloud of dust in the air. A mysterious dust storm! He got even more scared but he didn’t want his family to see it so he looked at his wife and decided he will step out of the house. He walked to the edge of the hill but there was nothing special that caught his attention. He stood wondering what the reason behind this dust storm might be. He continued looking with his hand over his head for clues when another strong current of wind came and pulled him off the hill into the sea. Mumma was unaware. Underwater the world is not so similar. It is quite different from the world we see every day before us. It’s much darker!

The storm in the sea and the rush in the water caused by it knocked Papa to an unconscious state. A big fish swam near him and grabbed his clothes with its mouth. This woke the man up and he started to panic! The fish called its other friends and soon a lot of fish started circling around him. Something gigantic and strange appeared to be floating towards them. Something human-like… waste plastic… there were bits and pieces of a wrecked ship too in the sea and it all flowed towards Papa. In a second all the fish scattered. Papa tried to swim after them but he couldn’t swim, the storm was too strong. He kept on trying but the huge thing and the pieces of the wrecked ship kept coming close. He prepared himself to grab onto whatever this huge thing was and to just go with the flow. In a matter of half a second he found himself holding onto something huge and flowing in the direction of the shore. He shut his eyes and waited for the storm to pass.

When he opened his eyes he saw the sun shining and the beach in front of him. He thought that maybe he is on the other side of the island of Liliput. Mumma, with the little baby still in her arms, went to the castle of the king and the queen to report that her husband has been missing. The guards at the gates stopped her. “What do you want?” they asked.
When she told them in all honesty what it was she wanted they told her that they cannot let her pass. She kept trying to go past them but they kept blocking the way. She tried from the right, then again from the left but a guard was always there to block her way.

Then a carriage arrived. It was the princess. She asked the poor lady, “What’s going on here?” On finding out that Mumma needed the assistance of the royal court the princess took her up to the castle in her carriage. As it is custom, the princess has no place inside a courtroom so she went straight to her chambers but she gave the poor lady a guarantee that the guards will find her husband. At the courtroom Mumma found herself rather uncomfortable because there was no one to give her company. She felt sad and lonely. The king and the queen were eating their meal and were to join the assembly gathered there shortly. Someone played the anthem of the Kingdom of Liliput on a trombone and there was joyous laughter for a brief moment in the courtroom.

The people of Liliput had many petty customs just like the one which prohibited the entry of the princess into the courtroom. Well, in the absence of the king and the queen the ministers seemed to be practicing some of their other petty debates. There was extreme disorder and unrest in the assembly. Those ministers dressed in black showed off their skills in sword fighting while those dressed in white performed an excellent show of circus style rope walking. From between the cries of merriment the king and the queen came onto the scene and there was decorum once again. The king demanded the man on the trombone to start the ceremony with necessary rituals. The trombone was played once again. Mumma demonstrated to the court mimetically how she thought her husband fell into the sea. The king taking her seriously immediately sent four guards to look for the lost man.

The soldiers scanning the beach for the lost man observed a loud thumping sound from the ground. It was a rhythmic thump, continuously ringing like the beating of a drum. They became curious and began to look for the source of this sound instead of looking for Mumma’s husband. Slowly, they learnt they had been walking on something that was alive. The sound was that of a beating heart!

They began to run in panic. They straight away went back to the castle and told everyone who was loyal to the throne of the king and the queen to come to the beach and see a giant who is sleeping. When everyone did come to the beach to see the giant, they were all blown away by how big the man really was. The mathematician among them announced that in fact the giant was nearly six feet tall when the people of Lilput are only six inches tall.

The king ordered the guards to tie the giant down. It took the people of Liliput nine hours just to tie him down. This giant was Gulliver, surgeon and traveler who had left his country on a journey into several remote nations of the world.

From the top of a third hill, Papa who was lost in the jungle watched everything without any clue of what was actually taking place. He thought Gulliver was a monster! Gulliver was not an evil monster rather he was a nice man. Papa wandered in the jungle for considerable time looking for the right path to his home. He kept finding the same trees and soon thought to himself that he was going in circle. He sat near a rock without any hopes of surviving when he suddenly saw a tree move at a distance. He got up in anticipation of approaching danger. Soon he saw that there was a horse behind the bush. He decided to go close to that horse and realized that in fact there were many horses, bigger than they usually are, almost the size of the giant on the beach. The horses seemed peaceful because when they took note of the little man they smiled at him. They surprised him by talking to him in an advanced language. They called themselves Houyhnhnms who are the masters of tiny barbaric humans. Marveling at the sight of this intelligent race of living beings who called themselves Houyhnhnms Papa ran in the opposite direction like a mad man.

When Gulliver regained consciousness the king and the rest of his men were sleeping. In the silence of the night time Mumma approached Gulliver and asked him with tears in her eyes if he had seen her husband. Gulliver looked at her and then at the baby in her arms and wished to say something. He looked at the people of Liliput who had set up a camp around him. He opened his mouth but only air came out. His lips were extremely dry. Everybody woke up with a scare at the sound of wind coming from Gulliver’s mouth and the soldiers took aim at him at once.
Mumma stopped them by shouting, “Just give him some water!”
The king arranged food and water for the giant. Gulliver ate a lot. Slowly he started talking to everyone explaining them things like who he was, where he was from, how he got there and what he wanted. The king was surprised to hear that Gulliver didn’t mean any harm, he was merely lost and wanted to build a ship so that he can go back home. The ministers laughed at him and instead claimed themselves to be the best constructionists in the whole world. They even demonstrated their skills by building a few structures in front of him.

The people of Liliput however had one weakness. Their weakness was that they were at war. While the king thought about whether or not to provide Gulliver with a ship the rest of his kingdom was shaken with the news of an oncoming attack by the enemy. In the court room a messenger arrived and read a scroll revealing of the whole thing to the ministers. Soon the enemy started to send pillagers and plunderers to the houses to loot and hurt innocent people. Gulliver was still captive at the foot of the hill when arrows and balls of fire started raining at the kingdom.

When the kingdom began to burn at the hands of war one day Papa miraculously found his way to the cave where the King of Liliput had kept Gulliver as prisoner. The little man was full of shock at the sight of the giant. Gulliver identified the man to be Mumma’s husband and asked him to keep quiet. The little man, who was in shock after having seen Houyhnhnms on the third hill and now unaware of Gulliver’s harmlessness tried to poke at him with a stick to save himself. This made Gulliver laugh and he tried to befriend Papa. Papa rambled on and on about gigantic horses who could speak like human beings and behaved like intelligent beings, who had uncivilized barbaric humanoids as their slaves but Gulliver ridiculed this story. He assured the little man that surely he must have seen it all in a dream.

Papa then told Gulliver that violence had once again consumed the kingdom and that he had to go to find his family. Gulliver requested the little man to untie him somehow. Looking at the size of the ropes Papa told him he will return with something sharp like a sword. He was all set to leave but the king and his ministers entered the cave. Papa hid himself in a corner remembering the ill-behaved conduct of the royal fleet. The king had come to Gulliver to ask for help. He wanted to see the enemy crushed beneath the fists and feet of the giant. Gulliver tried to explain to them again that he was not a cruel killer but the king didn’t accept this as an answer. He made Gulliver an offer. The offer was something like this - If Gulliver helps the people of Liliput in winning the war against their enemy they will build a boat for him and let him go. The king was happy and the trombone was played only after Gulliver agreed to the demands of the king. The king and his ministers left the cave once everyone was done singing slogans in the praise of the king.

Once the king and his men were gone Gulliver told the little man to come out. Papa asked the giant what he was going to do next. He told Papa that he will not kill anybody with his own hands, all he is is actually just a surgeon and a traveler.

Despite being powerful enough to torture his means out of the people of Liliput Gulliver never hurt them. He did what he could to stop the war and the violence but he was never arrogant about it. The sensibility of Gulliver in his own innocent way disallowed him to hurt anybody. Papa claimed that this sensibility should be a source of inspiration not only for the people of Liliput but also for their enemies. This giant should teach the people of Liliput to be kind and generous towards one another.

For the meanwhile Gulliver told the man that his family was fine and that he had seen them recently with his own eyes convincing the little man to stay inside the cave for his own safety.

The next morning when the guards at the king’s command came to take Gulliver to the battlefield the giant hid the little man in his hair. He took the little man out of the cave with him. The man with the trombone was standing underneath the flagstaff to welcome the king. Gulliver who was also there to meet the king greeted the musician but he confidently ignored the giant. The king then told Gulliver exactly what he was expecting him to do.
“Exactly as the sun will rise the enemy will approach the battlefield from the east. In return of the favor you have asked from us we need you to fling the enemy up in to the air”, said the king to Gulliver.
When the enemy finally appeared Gulliver signaled everyone to hide behind him.  He told Papa to hop into his shirt’s pocket. As soon as the enemy saw Gulliver their army abandoned the battlefield in extreme fear. Thinking the enemy will attack once the giant is off the battlefield the king asked everyone to wait and be on guard.
“Make sure you kill them”, the king commanded.
 In order to negotiate his innocence Gulliver again tried to make it stop. When the king refused his plea Gulliver decided to tell the people of Liliput how to make gunpowder so that they can fight for themselves and have the upper hand.
“This is not my battle to fight!”

Before telling them the recipe to gunpowder he also wished to find out the reason for the ongoing war. But the people of Liliput claimed that these matters were only the king’s business and not of the common people. All they know is that the enemy has always attacked them fairly regularly. On further learning that nobody in Liliput even knew what gunpowder was he immediately told them the recipe (sulfur, charcoal and potassium nitrate) and asked them to bring it to the battlefield as quickly as possible. A few of the scientific intellectuals went to fetch these from their lab. Gulliver showed them how to use gunpowder.

Soon there were many firecracker style of explosions. The enemy was constantly observing whatever the people of Liliput and the giant were up to. Whenever Gulliver turned his back on the enemy they’d come forward as to attack. A few times they even got to shoot several hundred arrows and balls of fire at the people of Liliput when Gulliver was not looking. Finally the people of Liliput were ready to fight a fair war. Gunpowder blew up the whole of the enemy’s fleet and easily killed the enemy.

Thereafter came a small attack in which Gulliver got a small wound on his calf. But the battle was won by Liliput. He laid down on the ground in pain just as the people of Liliput had found him for the first time. On Gulliver’s instructions Papa and the other Liliputians sealed his wound for him with their tiny hands. Slowly he became healthy again.

After the war ended Papa met his family, his wife and his little baby and from that time onwards they were happy for ever. Out of joy the king granted freedom to Gulliver and work on his boat completed with the help of all the people of Liliput.

Papa asked the giant why he never believed him when he told him there were horses almost as big as Gulliver in the jungles on the third hill. Gulliver had no answer. Out of gratitude the little man told him the way to the third hill and Gulliver set out to see the horses. He found the third hill and he wandered there for some time. Just as he was beginning to think that he should probably go back the Houyhnhnms showed themselves to him. These were horses who had little uncivilized human beings as their slaves. A field full of tamed little human beings cultivating land, constructing houses and carrying load at the instructions of the giants. Gulliver met them and talked to them. The horses told him that these humanoids were called Yahoos. Gulliver thought of himself as a Yahoo and his friends and his family and everyone he had ever met. He came to believe that in fact it is only these horses who are worthy of talking to. The more he interacted with them he got a sense that he will only ever enjoy talking to these horses and nobody else. He soon went back to England on the ship that was built for him. He asked the people of Liliput to name the ship The Umbu. In England he met Sir Daniel who had been waiting for him all this time but Gulliver did not enjoy talking to him all that much. He spent the rest of his days talking to horses.

The End.