View: Nessie, Yeti and those lovely lurking beasts can remythologise through mystery

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Sir Pellinore gives up the chase and returns to a well-earned rest in Camelot. 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.