Wander Lord

Interesting on art, nature, people, history

Category Archive: Mystery

Roraima – lost world

Roraima - lost world

Roraima – lost world


The entire south-eastern part of Venezuela, located in South America, is occupied by La Gran Sabana – the great savanna, which is crossed by the Caroni River, the right tributary of the Orinoco. There are many unusual plateaus with steep, inaccessible walls resembling huge tables. One of the greatest tables is Roraima. It is near Venezuela’s border with Brazil and for a long time it was inaccessible to people. Only daredevils from the Indian tribes from time to time made their way to the enchanted land, as they thought. They told about a wonderful plateau with cascades of waterfalls and magical rivers with red and black waters.
The first European researcher who visited this area in the middle of the XIX century was German Robert Hermann Schomburgk.
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Vampire – restless undead

Vampire - restless undead

Vampire – restless undead

There are many types of vampires in beliefs found all over the world. Some vampires are demons that attack at night, and are associated with night terrors. Vampires also were blamed for plagues, invisible terrors that bothered people at night and wasting diseases that brought death.
Western fiction and film have popularized the vampire as a glamorous and seductive living dead person who bites people on the neck. The victim of the vampire’s bite would become one of the “living dead”. Vampires have no shadows, and cannot cast a reflection in any mirror or reflective surface. Some vampires had the ability to turn into a wolf. These vampires were known as vukodlak.
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Basilisk – king of sand dunes

Basilisk - king of sand dunes

Basilisk – king of sand dunes


When the ancient Romans and Greeks appeared in the African desert for the first time, they looked at boundless barchans with astonishment and horror. The entire army could disappear there. Hundreds of miles of dead sand definitely had their master and patron. The ancient decided it was basilisk – king of the desert.
Now it is difficult to say who exactly was a prototype of the basilisk. Perhaps it was a small snake inhabiting the Libyan desert. It could attract the attention with its red “crown” and the way of moving. It moved almost vertically, standing on its own tail.
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Death in different cultures

Death in different cultures

Death in different cultures


Death marks the end of life. All living things go through the process of death, because it’s a natural process. Man is the only being who realizes the finiteness of his being.
Every culture has its own customs for dealing with death. Most customs include either burial or cremation of the body. Cemeteries are final resting places for the dead.
People have always been interested in what happens after death, but no one knows for certain.
In different cultures, in different parts of the world, the god of death was depicted in different ways, but all of these deities had similar features.
In the traditions and cultures of many peoples throughout the world, death is personified as a skeletal figure dressed in black.
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Dragon – mythical beast

Dragon – mythical beast

Dragon – mythical beast


A dragon is awesome, reptilelike beast. It appears in the folklore of nearly every country. Dragons prowled the earth, devoured hapless villagers, received periodic sacrifices of young maidens, spread terror into the hearts of all, and were thwarted only by courageous knights. For years, children have been read tales, seen motion pictures, and heard songs of reluctant dragons, kindly dragons, affectionate dragons, magic dragons, and timid dragons.
The image of the dragon in world mythology appeared already during the Sumerian culture. It’s hard to say what caused the birth of an amazing creature – whether something like that existed in fact, and then died out with dinosaurs and mastodons, or an ancient man wanted to connect heaven and earth, and then a mysterious beast emerged from the depths of the imagination.
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Soaring coffins

Soaring coffins

Soaring coffins

Wooden coffins hanging on the rocks are a scary view. However, this method of burial is known since ancient times in China.
High in the mountains, among the rocks there are coffins – the only reminder of the mysterious and almost disappeared people who lived in the south-western part of modern China. Bo people had always remained an ethnic minority of the populous country. But, despite this, they managed to create a bright original culture, which would develop further if it was not bloody war with the Ming Dynasty.
What made people to have such a strange tradition? How did they lift coffins, weighing up to 200 kilograms, 100-200 meters high?
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Sable Island – Island of lost ships

Sable Island - Island of lost ships

Sable Island – Island of lost ships

Sable Island is in the North Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Canada, in a place where the warm Gulf Stream meets the cold Labrador Current. It is crescent-shaped island, 42 km long and 1.5 km wide. It is the most mysterious and the most dangerous island in the world.
Until now, no one knows exactly who has discovered this island. Norwegians say that the Vikings were the first. The French believe that the fishermen from Normandy and Brittany discovered it at the beginning of the XVI century.
But most modern geographers and historians agree that Sable was discovered by French traveler, who in 1508 sailed from Europe to the peninsula, which later was named the British Acadia and later – Nova Scotia.
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