Wild colonial landscapes alone triggered terror, without monsters

Evidence

Monsters also continued to appear abroad, often in colonial spaces that functioned simultaneously as sites of desire and repulsion, expressions of the European mindset of the time, a “proto-anthropology with racist and political overtones.” Exotic monsters, from the giant cannibals of Fiji to the croco-sapiens of Egypt, continued to populate the imaginations of tourists, explorers, and the even the most brilliant scientists. Unfamiliar landscapes inspired new monsters, a result of the European (and later, American) attitudes surrounding untamed places, places that were scary in and of themselves. “But forests and mountains—and with them deserts, jungles, even islands—need not to be populated to be fearsome. It was enough that these places were wild: that was the trigger to the terror.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 356

Categorization

• XREF: The wild-place-terror trigger parallels the reader’s question 2 (image preceding contact): the fear of the place precedes any foe inhabiting it, mirroring fear of Islam preceding actual Muslims.
• SEED: Could anchor an essay on ‘landscape as first monster’ — terror attached to wildness itself then projected onto inhabitants, using the Croco-sapiens and Gévaudan links.