His retirement, however, is short-lived. For a plaintive snuffling outside the city’s walls announces the Questing Beast’s presence, which has tracked down its erstwhile pursuer to coax him into renewing the chase. After all, what’s the use of being a Questing Beast if there’s no one questing after you?
With a sigh of noblesse oblige, the gallant knight dons the spurs that he’d hung up and sets off again in pursuit of his fugitive. The maps of antiquity, which featured vast tracts of uncharted terror firma, marked with the ominous caveat, ‘Here Be Dragons’, have long been dispelled by the hi-tech wand of GPS navigational systems that have forever banished unexplored wildernesses from the face of the planet.
But the enticing unknown still exists, lurking in the twilight zone of fertile imagination, where wondrous things still go bump in the impending night of undiscovery, their silent siren songs luring us to search for them. Unlike Sir Pellinore, we have not one, but many Questing Beasts, to track down in the labyrinth of legendary lore.
Perhaps, the most celebrated of these creatures is the Loch Ness Monster, who’s earned herself a feminine identity and the endearing nickname of Nessie. She is believed to inhabit the Scottish lake of that name, the largest and one of the deepest freshwater bodies in Britain. First purportedly spotted in 1933 by the manager of a lakeside hotel, Nessie has attained worldwide fame and become the biggest tourist draw in the region.
These numbers are set to reach recordbreaking levels at the end of this month when the official Loch Ness Centre has announced the biggest-ever search for Nessie and sent out a summons to ‘all budding monster hunters’ to participate in it. The proposed hunt will use modern gadgetry to unearth – or rather, unwater – the gargantuan critter, which now has evaded successive attempts at finding it, including one organised by the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau in 1972.Closer to home is the realm of the humanoid Yeti, the so-called Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, said to be a denizen of the high pinnacles of eternal snow. During the 1950s-1960s, when the Cold War was at its peak, and Earth a ticking doomsday clock minutes away from nuclear Armageddon, inexplicable phenomena like UFOs, and little green men from Mars, provided diverting distraction from the looming threat of destruction.The Yeti took pride of place in this unearthly pageant, and in 1961, Everest hero Edmund Hillary led a team on a six-month-long quest for the Snowman. Though tracks supposedly left by it were discovered, the creature proved untraceable, and a supposed ‘Yeti’ scalp obtained from a remote monastery turned out upon forensic scrutiny to be that of a Himalayan bear.
However, the Yeti remains tantalising bait for monster buffs. As does its overseas counterpart, Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, a large, 8-foot-plus hairy inhabitant of the forests of the Pacific Northwest in the US and Canada. Unlike the Yeti, whose existence no documented evidence exists, Bigfoot has allegedly been captured in blurry photographs.
May Sasquatch and his marvellously monstrous ilk remain forever unfound. For they may well satisfy a deep-seated psychic need by doing so. According to Carl Jung, the triumph of scientific rationalism has ‘desacralised’ the world of the mind, which we require to remythologise through mystery.
And what better mystery than made-up monsters, seductive serpents of a forsaken Eden?
