Gayo Nakan, 'the Big Eater', is a giant king of Kadazan-Dusun legend who lived in the country at the foot of Mount Kinabalu. His appetite was so immense that the people, labouring to feed him, were brought to despair; learning of their plight, the king decreed that he should be buried alive to relieve them of their burden. The task proved beyond human strength, and the impatient giant at last uttered words of power and sank of his own accord into the rock up to his shoulders. Because his people had failed him, he cursed the land with drought and famine, yet he also promised to come to their aid in times of war. In some tellings the exposed head and shoulders of the buried king form the summit mass of Kinabalu itself, making the tale one of the two principal origin legends of the mountain alongside the work of the creator deities; heritage scholarship on Kinabalu accordingly pairs 'the Giant King Gayo Nakan' with the creation account of Kinohiringan and Umunsumundu. He is distinct from Gayo Ngaran, 'the Great Name', the reverential title given to the sacred mountain and its ancestral guardian.