Читать книгу The Monster Book - Nick Redfern - Страница 45

The idea that there could be monstrous, man-eating beasts of an unknown nature, lurking in the wilder parts of our planet, is not at all implausible. But, what about man-eating plants and trees? As incredible as it may sound, there is no shortage of reports of flesh-eating flora. In 1878, a German explorer named Carl Liche traveled to the island of Madagascar, where he witnessed nothing less than a human sacrifice to a tree! The horrific details were laid out in a letter penned by Liche himself and sent to the South Australian Register in 1881. According to Liche, the unfortunate victim was a woman of the Mkodo tribe, who was tied to the terrible tree, seemingly as a gift to it. Liche said:

An 1887 illustration of the man-eating tree described by Carl Liche.

“The slender delicate palpi, with the fury of starved serpents, quivered a moment over her head, then as if instinct with demoniac intelligence fastened upon her in sudden coils round and round her neck and arms; then while her awful screams and yet more awful laughter rose wildly to be instantly strangled down again into a gurgling moan, the tendrils one after another, like great green serpents, with brutal energy and infernal rapidity, rose, retracted themselves, and wrapped her about in fold after fold, ever tightening with cruel swiftness and savage tenacity of anacondas fastening upon their prey.”

Researcher Brent Swancer says of the flesh-devouring tree that it “was described as being around 8 feet in height, and having an appearance reminiscent of a pineapple, with eight long, pointed leaves that hung down from its top to the ground. The trunk of the tree was topped with a sort of receptacle that contained a thick liquid said to have soporific qualities that drugged potential prey and was believed to be highly addictive. Surrounding this receptacle were long, hairy tendrils with six white palpi resembling tentacles. The tree possessed white, transparent leaves that reminded Liche of the quivering mouthparts of an insect.”

Moving on, the American Weekly, on January 4, 1925, included in its pages an article titled “Escaped from the Embrace of the Man-Eating Tree.” It described an encounter in the Philippines, in which a man—referred to only as Bryant from Mississippi—and his native guide came across a truly unusual tree, around thirty-five feet in height and roughly ninety feet in diameter. Rather ominously, the tree stunk of rotting flesh, and a human skull could be seen at its base. It was the curious dimensions—which gave it something of a bulbous shape—that first caught the attention of the man; it wasn’t long at all before something else grabbed his attention—as in literally. As the man stood and stared at the tree, he realized to his horror that it was reaching out to him. The American Weekly said of what happened next:

As the man stood and stared at the tree, he realized to his horror that it was reaching out to him.

“The whole thing had changed shape and was horribly alive and alert. The dull, heavy leaves had sprung from their compact formation and were coming at him from all directions, advancing on the ends of long vine-like stems which stretched across like the necks of innumerable geese and, now that the old man had stopped his screaming, the air was full of hissing sounds. The leaves did not move straight at their target, but with a graceful, side-to-side sway, like a cobra about to strike. From the far side, the distant leaves were peeping and swaying on their journey around the trunk and even the tree top was bending down to join in the attack. The bending of the trunk was spasmodic and accompanied by sharp cracks.

“The effect of this advancing and swaying mass of green objects was hypnotic, like the charm movements of a snake. Bryant could not move, though the nearest leaf was within an inch of his face. He could see that it was armed with sharp spines on which a liquid was forming. He saw the heavy leaf curve like a green-mittened hand, and as it brushed his eyebrows in passing he got the smell of it—the same animal smell that hung in the surrounding air. Another instant and the thing would have had his eyes in its sticky, prickly grasp, but either his weakness or the brown man’s strength threw them both on their backs. The charm was broken. They crawled out of the circle of death and lay panting in the grass while the malignant plant, cracking and hissing, yearned and stretched and thrashed to get at them.”

Despite the incredible nature of the story, it’s important to note that it was written for the American Weekly by a very credible source: a botanist and naturalist named Willard Nelson Clute, who was the author of numerous books, including The Useful Plants of the World and A Dictionary of American Plant Names. Who knows? Perhaps the deadly, people-eating plant of the Philippines still exists, still luring the unwary into its deadly embrace.

Finally, there is the 1881 account of Philip Robinson, who, in Under the Punkah, wrote of his uncle’s near-death experience with a plant hungry for human flesh somewhere along the Nile River:

Botanist Willard Nelson Clute, a professor and founder of the American Fern Society, wrote about the dangerous plant in the Philippines.

“This awful plant, that rears its splendid death-shade in the central solitude of a Nubian fern forest, sickens by its unwholesome humors all vegetation from its immediate vicinity, and feeds upon the wild beasts that, in the terror of the chase, or the heat of noon, seek the thick shelter of … the birds that, flitting across the open space, come within the charmed circle of its power, or innocently refresh themselves from the cups of its great waxen flowers; upon even man himself when, an infrequent prey, the savage seeks its asylum in the storm, or turns from the harsh foot-wounding sword-grass of the glade, to pluck the wondrous fruit that hang plumb down among the wondrous foliage. And such fruit!

“Glorious golden ovals, great honey drops, swelling by their own weight into pear-shaped translucencies. The foliage glistens with a strange dew, that all day long drips on to the ground below, nurturing a rank growth of grasses, which shoot up in places so high that their spikes of fierce blood-fed green show far up among the deep-tinted foliage of the terrible tree, and, like a jealous body-guard, keep concealed the fearful secret of the charnel-house within, and draw round the black roots of the murderous plant a decent screen of living green.”