Sciapods
The desert is full of unusual creatures which have evolved peculiar ways of surviving in such an inhospitable place. The Fennec Fox, for example, has large ears to dissipate heat, and the Gila Monster can live off the fat in its tail underground for months at a time. Thus, it is no surprise to find that a strange group of monsters were believed by the ancients to live in the desert, ‘called Sciapods (Shadow-Foots) tribe, because in the hotter weather they lie on their backs on the ground and protect themselves with the shadow of their feet’ (Pliny, Natural History).
The single umbrella-foot acted not only for shade, but also paradoxically made the Sciapod extremely fast moving: Pliny also tells us that Sciapods ‘are able to leap with surprising agility’, and other sources such as Isidore note the incredible speed of these hops. One leg was apparently faster than two. Medieval travellers seldom returned without an anecdote of seeing Sciapods shading under their own foot, or the speed with which they hop from danger, and the maps of the period, known as Mappae mundi (‘maps of the world’) frequently depict the creatures in the outlying areas of the known world.
On the huge Hereford Mappa Mundi, which dates from c.1300 and has a circumference of around 52 inches, a Sciapod is depicted in the Ganges delta. In this depiction, the Sciapod is sat upright on its bottom, holding its calf so as to keep the oversized foot over its head. This is the most common way of depicting Sciapods, and allowed illustrators to make an elegant circular form. This standard iconography reminds us that the idea of a creature using an appendage for shade is not so outlandish: the Cape Ground Squirrel uses its tail for the same purpose.
The Sciapod was not a dangerous monster, and if anything seems to be more afraid of people than they are of it. This suggests an aspect of the Sciapod’s message as a monster: it is reputed to be impossible to catch, making it something of a Will o’ the wisp, perhaps representing the elusiveness of knowledge about the unexplored regions of the world. The circular form has also been suggested as a cognate of the ouroboros (the snake eating its own tail), which in Western tradition equates to the cycle of life and the process of death and rebirth.