The Ghost and the Darkness
I like museums and I like light-hearted, kiddy movies, so no wonder that I wanted to see "Night at the Museum".
It became available on DVD recently and immediately we borrowed it from Blockbuster and saw it.
Well, this is not a movie review, so all I will ( unashamedly ) say is that I really liked this movie.
However, there were a couple of scenes in the movie, which kept on reminding me of the time when I had stood before the exhibit of two small lions in the Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History and tried to imagine the havoc these two sleek-looking, undersized (They looked undersized because of the taxidermy.) beasts had created in Tsavo. They had unleashed a regular reign of terror and killed about 140 Indian laborers engaged in the construction of Uganda-Mombasa railway over a period of twelve months, practically bringing the construction to a halt, before meeting their death at the hands of Lieutenant Colonel Patterson in 1898.
A lion looks majestic only if he has a magnificient mane, otherwise, it's coloring is drab and dull. A lion without a mane looks like a lioness. I do not mean to say that lionesses are not ferocious, but a stuffed lioness looks hardly impressive.
The two lions before me, named as "The Ghost" and "The Darkness" by the laborers, were anything but impressive. They were small and maneless. I suppose, being used as floor rugs by J.H. Patterson, who ultimately managed to kill them, was hardly the best treatment for their skins.
"So, you are the Ghost and the Darkness", I said silently to them.
They looked back at me impassively through their glass, unseeing eyes. Their mouths were open and their fangs showed as though in rictus.
In actual life, they were bigger, I suppose.
"You big kittycats, are you not ashamed of yourselves for killing those defenceless poor laborers ? What do you have to say for yourselves?" I silently asked them.
They continued to stare at me without even a shred of guilt.
It was alright for me to scold them in the well-lighted Chicago museum, when they were in their glass-case and had been dead for more than a hundred years. But, if I were a laborer on that ill-fated railway project, would I have sneered at them ? More likely, I would have absconded.
The 1996 movie 'The Ghost and the Darkness' brings out the whole fearful atmosphere of those days. It is an excellent movie and Val Kilmer has acted very well in it.
The book, "The maneaters of Tsavo" by John Henry Patterson is worth a read. It is the most authentic narration of the event leading to the hunt and killing of these two beasts.
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