Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters (5 page)

That the Rukh seems to have done exactly what bearded vultures were doing, but on a grander scale, hints that the formation of this monster actually
required
the careful observations of the natural world that ultimately played a part in driving the Calydonian boar and Nemean lion to their end.

But why invent a Rukh at all? To answer this, it is helpful to look at what the Rukh offered that both the Calydonian boar and the Nemean lion did not. At its core, the Rukh differs from the boar and lion only in its ability to fly. Neither the boar nor the lion could contribute to the fears of ancient sailors heading off into the unexplored seas. The Rukh, on the other hand, because it had wings and could soar over oceans, remained a threat.

In Hindu mythology, the Rukh had something of a kindhearted
alter ego in the form of Garuda, a giant bird of prey that the god Vishnu rode as an aerial mount. Garuda was a champion of good and frequently depicted in the
Mahabharata
as hunting venomous snakes and snakelike creatures. And in modern mythology, J. R. R. Tolkien presents the giant eagles in
The Lord of the Rings
as allies who save the wizard Gandalf when he is imprisoned by the villainous wizard Saruman. Why such variation?

It is impossible to know what the inventors of these benevolent beasts were thinking when they created them, but one possibility might be that regional understandings of birds and snakes differed between those dwelling in Middle Eastern settlements where the Rukh legend formed and Southeast Asian settlements where Garuda did.

Certainly, from the perspective of snakebites, these regions show very different patterns. In 1998, a review of the morbidity and mortality of snakebites in locations around the world was published in the
Bulletin of the World Health Organization
. Aside from pointing out that deaths from snakebites are a major health problem in many places, the report presents some of the best available data on where humans are most likely to get bitten by a snake, fall ill from the bite, and die.

In India, the situation is relatively bad. The number of bites per year that actually get reported averages around 114.5 per 100,000 people, and roughly half require medical intervention to treat the spread of the venom through the body. Fortunately, due to the availability of antivenins, only 3 people per 100,000 typically die annually. In the Middle East, the situation is staggeringly different. An average of 12.5 bites are reported per 100,000 people and only 0.062 people per 100,000 die.

In fairness, perhaps it is not appropriate to look at current deaths from snakebites, since this could represent more of a commentary on the state of medical facilities in these two regions than on the threats actually presented by snakes, but the sheer number of snakebites being reported per year is probably a somewhat fair representation of the overall snake threat to the local population. With this in mind,
it is pretty obvious that the snakes of India are a much more serious hazard than the snakes of the Middle East. And a 1954 report in the
Bulletin of the World Health Organization
confirms this by concluding that Southeast Asia was the fatal snakebite capital of the world at the time.

In both regions, there are birds of prey that hunt snakes, but among locals in India, where snakes currently inflict nine times more bites per 100,000 people than they do in the Middle East, one has to wonder if seeing birds of prey killing these dangerous animals might have been viewed as something positive. Did the goodness of Garuda have to do with the serious dangers presented by snakes? Was it the snake-hunting services provided by birds in the region that led to the invention of the noble Garuda in the first place? This all seems likely.

As for Tolkien, he was writing at a time (the 1950s) when it was well known that birds of prey attack snakes far more often than they attack people. Whether this knowledge was what guided his decision to present giant eagles as allies rather than enemies is unknown, though. What we do know is that giant animals have continued to exist as monsters all the way up to the present day.

Many modern giant animals are not taken seriously. Indeed, in Rob Reiner’s 1987 film
The Princess Bride,
as the protagonists wander their way through the perilous fire swamp, the princess turns to her protector and asks, “Westley, what of the R.O.U.S.’s?” He responds, “Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don’t think they exist.” Westley is then, of course, promptly attacked by a giant rodent.

This scene is not intended to frighten viewers. The giant rodent isn’t realistic, believable, or scary. When it yelps in pain, it sounds more like a Muppet than a monster. The humor in the scene stems from mockery because, to modern audiences, animals of mythic proportion seem totally absurd.

Yet these monsters are not as extinct as they might at first seem.
Giant boars and huge birds of prey may no longer feature as monsters in modern culture, but many other animals do. Consider the birds that feature in Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Birds
or the spiders that are the stars in Frank Marshall’s
Arachnophobia.

Here are animals that, like the Nemean lion, are tweaked in some very basic way. Hitchcock’s birds look like normal birds but behave like crazed predators, hungering for human flesh. Marshall’s spiders are different from other spiders only in that they are highly resistant to insecticides. Indeed, the really scary aspects of the monsters in these movies—the fact that the birds swarm people and that the bite of the spiders is lethal—are very much real. Birds can and do swarm people and there are spiders that have bites so lethal that they can kill people quickly.
15

Once again, study of the natural world is responsible for the birth of these monsters. The idea of birds killing by swarming or spiders wiping out an entire village with their venomous bites could have come about only as a result of people seeing such things happen in the real world. And it is precisely because these monsters are so easily accepted by educated modern audiences that they have succeeded in striking so much terror into our hearts.

So animals still exist as monsters, but instead of scaring people with their size and strength, they now do so with natural abilities that are subtly altered by creative Hollywood minds to be more malevolent and threatening than they actually are. Yet there is, of course, one monstrous animal that is an exception. Hardly small and venomous, or even remotely in the same category as any other modern animal monsters, is the colossal ape, Kong.

Created for the cinema in 1933 by Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, Kong has since been reincarnated for
King Kong
movie viewers nine times. In every single film, Kong is found in a remote part of the world that has remained unexplored for one reason or another. These remote places are always home to other huge animals; in some cases these are dinosaurs, in others, they are just very large versions of common animals like snakes and lizards. The story line for each film brings humans to Kong for different reasons, but the ape always develops an emotional bond with the leading lady, nurtures and cares for her in the wilderness, and ends up being shot by aircraft while trying to protect her from harm.

Yes, Kong is big, frightening, and lethal. In every film dozens of humans are slain by Kong’s actions, but he is not specifically revealed as malevolent as the man-eating Nemean lion or the orchard-ravaging Calydonian boar. Moreover, all of the films end with a sense of sadness over the death of the giant ape. There is no feeling of terror or fear of Kong by the end of the films, only sympathy.

At first glance, Kong’s story seems the same as that of other monstrous animals. Like the Nemean lion, he is a monstrous animal from unexplored wilderness wreaking havoc on civilization. But Kong is different from these monsters of Greece. Ancient monstrous animals are not natural. They are the products of the gods and are sent to Earth to create pain and suffering. The Rukh, on the other hand, is not brought to the world by gods but discovered by humans; it just attacks those who tamper with its eggs. The spiders in
Arachnophobia
are dangerous animals from the deep jungle that are accidentally brought by humans back to civilization. Kong also is a dangerous natural animal brought from the wilderness to civilization but he is intentionally brought back for profit. Really, Kong’s story is a morality tale about the consequences of exploiting the natural world, raising the question of whether it would have been better to have just left Kong alone.

Most intriguingly, Kong is distinctly a “he,” and that cannot just be dismissed. It indicates a key difference in the way audiences identify with the monster. None of the other giant animal monsters are ever described by gender. By being given gender, Kong is, in a way, brought one step closer to humanity and made less of a monster. In our quest to understand what monsters say about human fears through the ages, such a dramatic difference between the most famous modern giant animal monster and ancient monsters of the same type is intriguing. Why the decision to make the men in the story so insensitive and cruel? Is there something in society that we now fear more than the jungle?

4
Until the lunatic owner of an exotic-animal farm in Ohio housing eighteen Bengal tigers, seventeen lions, and numerous other carnivores opens up all of his enclosures to the outside world and then shoots himself in the head.

5
When you are the goddess of the hunt, I guess you end up with some pretty exotic pets.

6
In 2011, a wonderful little article in the academic journal
Biotropica
suggested that a solution to Greece’s financial problems might involve reforesting large swaths of land and reintroducing lions to the landscape to encourage ecotourism. While no action on this matter has yet been taken by the Greek government, they might be wise to look beyond ecotourism and consider connecting such conservation actions toward their long and well-known mythical traditions. “Come to Nemea and see the legendary lion that battled Hercules!”

7
Not to mention unbelievably fierce, since stabbing, but not killing, many large predators can just send them into a furious rage.

8
The skull of an elephant has a large space in the center where the muscles for the trunk attach. However, trunks are made up of soft tissues that rot away after death. To those without a background in paleontology (a description that pretty much applied to all of the ancient Greeks), such skulls look like they have one giant eye in the center. Moreover, the presence of tusks adds the impression that the Cyclops has fangs.

9
It is also possible that hunters went out to kill a lion, failed, nearly got eaten in the process, and just made up the story of the lion being invulnerable to save face. Adrenaline makes men do and say the stupidest things.

10
In 2004, a boar was shot and killed in Alabama that was initially claimed by the hunter to be 12 feet (3.6 meters) long and to weigh more than 1,000 pounds (450 kilograms). This was more than twice the length and weight of the wild boars known to be roaming the U.S. wilderness, so a team of researchers funded by the National Geographic Society went to check out the grave of this creature that locals were calling “Hogzilla.” As mentioned earlier, the adrenaline of the hunt leads to mistaken perceptions, and the hunter was—no surprise—proved to have exaggerated the animal’s size. When the researchers dug up the animal, they found the boar to be only 7 feet (2 meters) long and weighing in at 800 pounds (360 kilograms). That’s a big boar, but still very close to the upper range of natural wild boars. Hogzilla was thus something of a hoax.

11
Tabloids… not a modern invention.

12
And named it something ridiculous like
Picnic with Boar.

13
The physics supporting all of this is a chore, but if we work with the assumption that, like eagles, the Rukh could lift half its own body weight into the air to fly off with a 4,500-kilogram elephant, the bird would be around 9,000 kilograms, and the combined bird plus elephant payload would be 13,500 kilograms. Classic lift theory states that: Lift =
¹
/
₂
(
þ
•
v
²
) •
S
•
Cl
, where
þ
is the air density (1.18 kg/m
³
),
v
is the velocity (say, 9 m/s),
S
is the projected area (m
²
), and
Cl
is the dimensionless lift coefficient (say, 1.15, based on measurements for a vulture). This means the bird would need a wing area of 245 m
²
to stay aloft carrying an elephant. In aerodynamics, the aspect ratio of a wing is essentially the ratio of its length to its breadth, a measurement called the chord. A high aspect ratio indicates long, narrow wings, whereas a low aspect ratio indicates short, stubby wings. For most wings, the length of the chord is not a constant but varies along the wing, so the aspect ratio
AR
is defined as the square of the wingspan
b
divided by the area
S
of the wing platform. This is equal to the length-to-breadth ratio for constant breadth: