In The Land Of The Little People: Part 1

I - Introduction

The town where I live has grown a lot over the last few years. However, there is only one building that is four stories tall, and a few that have three, the rest are all low buildings of only one or two floors, which are usually shorter than the trees that stand here and there around the streets between them. In the centre, almost all the houses are of the old colonial style – high, stone-framed windows, protected by iron grilles, regularly spaced along the front, big wide double doors of heavy wood in the main entrance archway, and gently sloping roofs of earthenware tiles that jut out across the whole pavement, to shelter passers-by from the torrential rains in the hurricane season.

What is more, you don’t need to walk very far from the centre to come across patches of undeveloped land, still covered in bushes and undergrowth, and between the centre and the newer outlying neighbourhoods, you can see many fields of coffee bushes, shaded by centuries old trees. All this greenery is well within what constitute the boundaries of the town.

It should perhaps be of no surprise then, to students of folklore, to learn that our town defies the conventions of twenty-first century reductionist logic, and that we humans are not the only people who live here – there are also the little people!

I hope I haven’t just lost half my readers! Please bear with me, for I too was initially rather sceptical, then a little less so, and finally, after speaking to so many sensible people who have not only witnessed the little peoples’ pranks, but have actually seen them, and even conversed with them, I have to admit that things may not be as we have been brought up to believe in our shiny, steel, plastic and neon, hi-tech, ultra-neo-modernist world!

Elves, Pixies, Faeries, Gnomes, etc. – we were told that all of these are but the fantasy of children’s tales. Not here! My friends and neighbours call them 'Chaneques’ and here they are as real as you or I. The number of people who tell you these stories so matter-of-factly, and with no benefit to be gained from having invented them, is so great that it is hard to deny their existence.

In fact, except for those who have moved here recently from the capital or elsewhere, everybody has some story to tell about them, if it didn't happen to them personally, it happened to their cousin, parent, uncle, friend, etc. Those who have seen them usually describe them as looking like small children, but their faces are those of old people.


These are their favourite tricks:
- getting people lost. This can happen even when somebody is on their own ranch, where they have lived all their life, and which know their way around perfectly.
- moving small children. Fortunately they don't usually take them away, and if they do they seldom keep them. Often they take babies from on top of a bed, and lay them gently down on the floor underneath the bed.
- throwing stones at people. This is not so common, but it has happened to at least one friend of mine.
- other pranks in general - moving things, hiding things, taking things away and later putting them back exactly where you first looked for them.

Remarkably similar tales are told in all corners of the globe, with the little people hiding things, taking children and generally causing mischief from Japan to Britain, to Latin America. Is it not, then, more incredible to imagine that all over the world, exactly the same fiction could be invented independently, than to accord these stories some degree of truth?

Whatever your opinion, I hope you enjoy the strange stories that I shall share with you!

NEXT: The Mystery Drummer