[00:00.17]Chapter 5.
[00:03.49]The Kingdom of Brobdingnag.
[00:07.89]I had to work so hard on my tour of the country that I got very thin.
[00:14.40]So when the queen saw me and wanted to buy me, the farmer was delighted.
[00:21.61]He was expecting me to drop dead any minute.
[00:28.94]I asked the queen to let Glumdalclitch stay with me, and of course, Glumdalclitch was overjoyed to live in the palace.
[00:38.83]The king was very interested in me, too, and sent for three professors to make sure I wasn't clockwork.
[00:47.58]The professors thought I was a baby until they looked through a magnifying glass and saw the stubble on my chin.
[00:55.88]And after that, they decided I was a sort of odd freak that had just popped up by mistake.
[01:04.93]So the king, who was a sensible sort of person, sent the professors away.
[01:11.60]He had a fine box made for me to live in, and he often sent for me so I could tell him about my travels.
[01:20.63]I must say though, that he found it hard not to laugh at the idea that countries of such little creatures as me could think themselves important and call themselves lords or even kings.
[01:39.71]This made me cross, but of course, I was in no position to argue with him.
[01:45.68]In any case, I was getting used to the size of the enormous people around me.
[01:52.45]If I'd seen a group of humans strutting around, thinking themselves very grand, I might well have laughed myself.
[02:01.75]There was one person at court though, who was jealous of my size.
[02:09.51]The queen had a very small page, and before I arrived, he'd been everyone's favorite.
[02:18.39]He decided to get rid of me.
[02:22.64]One day, when Glumdalclitch was at the other end of the room, he grabbed me and dropped me into a big bowl of cream.
[02:34.67]It was lucky I was a good swimmer, for the queen was in too much of a panic to do anything but screech.
[02:43.65]Even so, I had swallowed a lot of cream before Glumdalclitch could rescue me.
[02:51.60]The page was beaten and made to drink all the cream.
[02:57.53]But even so, I felt a lot happier after the queen sent him away to a friend.
[03:04.87]That place was nerve-wracking enough as it was, without people trying to murder me.
[03:15.70]Even the flies were dangerous in Brobdingnag, because some of them were nearly as big as blackbirds.
[03:24.60]They'd buzz around me while I was eating and could bite really painfully.
[03:31.95]I spent half my meal times slashing them away with my knife, which the queen found hilarious.
[03:43.66]Worse still, one day at breakfast, there was a droning like 20 bagpipes, and a swarm of wasps came in through the window.
[03:55.04]I leaped up and managed to kill four of them with my sword, but not before one of them carried off my piece of cake.
[04:06.06]The stings on the dead wasps were nearly as long as my little finger.
[04:12.74]I pulled them out and kept them carefully, and later gave them to a museum.
[04:24.46]I was surrounded by so many dangers in Brobdingnag that it wasn't often that Glumdalclitch left me alone.
[04:33.46]She was always worried about me.
[04:37.71]When she did leave me in peace, I enjoyed myself so much that I didn't tell her about any adventures I had had.
[04:48.07]Glumdalclitch never knew, for instance, about the time a hawk swooped down on me, and I only just escaped by hiding under a thyme bush.
[05:00.33]Or the time a frog jumped into the boat the queen had had made for me and nearly overturned it.
[05:10.13]But there was no hiding my most terrible adventure.
[05:15.59]I was sitting in my box one day when there was a thumping on the wall, and I saw two bright eyes peering in through the open window.
[05:28.28]My first reaction was to dive down into the far corner of my box.
[05:35.03]But a great hand came in and groped about.
[05:42.44]I did my best to avoid it, but it caught me by the coat.
[05:49.56]Then it dragged me out, and I found myself cradled in the arms of the queen's pet monkey.
[05:59.26]It didn't seem to want to hurt me, but it kept trying to shove disgusting bits of stuff into my mouth.
[06:10.03]I was just beginning to wonder if I was going to survive this, when there was a noise at the door, and the monkey jumped right out of the window and up onto the roof.
[06:24.27]Everyone panicked.
[06:28.14]Glumdalclitch started screaming, the servants rushed to get ladders, and some of the people down below started throwing stones in the hope of frightening the monkey down.
[06:43.17]Of course, this panicked the monkey, too.
[06:48.97]He dumped me on the topmost ridge of the roof and bounced away.
[06:55.83]There I clung giddily, a quarter of a mile above the ground, expecting every moment to be blown to my death by the stiff breeze.
[07:09.42]No one can know how grateful I was when a brave boy risked his life to climb up to me.
[07:18.17]I was half choked with the revolting stuff the monkey had tried to feed me, and I was so nearly squeezed to death that I had to go to bed for two weeks.
[07:32.53]I spent a lot of time with the queen's ladies while I was recovering.
[07:38.11]They were great fun, but I have to say they smelled horrible.
[07:46.83]Mind you, I think this was partly because they were so big.
[07:54.61]Once when I was in Lilliput, a very good friend said the same about me after I'd been doing a lot of exercise.
[08:07.01]But although everyone was very kind, people kept laughing at me.
[08:14.86]There was the time I tried to jump over a huge pile of mud and didn't find out it was dog's mess until I'd landed in the middle of it.
[08:25.75]That amused everyone hugely.
[08:31.96]The whole palace laughed for days about that.