CHAPTER III.

Comparatively Small Number of Mythical Bird-Forms--The Martlet--The Bird of Paradise--The Humma--The Huppe--The Ibis--The Roc--The Hameh Bird--Reptiles, Fish, &c.--The Sea-Serpent--The Adissechen of Hindu Mythology--The Iormungandur of Scandinavian Mythology--The Egg Talisman--Fire-Drake--Aspis--Amphisbena--Kraken--Cetus--Leviathan-- Behemoth--Nautilus--Dolphin--The Acipenser--The Remora--The Fish Nun-- The Chilon--The Dies--Sea-Bishops and Sea-Monks--Davy Jones and his Locker--Ojibiway Legend of the Great Serpent--Fabledom in the Vegetable Kingdom--The Barnacle Tree--The Kalpa-Tarou--The Lote Tree--The Tree of Life--Lotus-Eating--Amaranth--Lotus Wreaths at Kew from the Egyptian Tombs--Asphodel--Mediæval Herbals--Ambrosia--The Upas Tree--The Umdhlebi Tree of Zululand--The Kerzereh Flower--The Mandrake--"Miracles of Art and Nature"--Travellers' Tales--The Dead Sea Apple--Alimos--The Meto-- The Herb Viva--Cockeram on Herb-Lore--The Pseudodoxia of Dr. Browne-- Herb Basil--The "Eikon Basilike"--Fitzherbert's "Boke of Husbandry."

While we find numerous extraordinary beliefs clustering round the so-called natural history of various birds, such as the legend of the pelican nourishing its young with its own blood, or the eagle teaching its offspring to gaze on the brightness of the mid-day sun, it is curious to note how little of absolute myth-creation has been developed in the direction of strange forms of bird life. On the other hand, many of the weird creations of fancy, such as the dragon or the phoca, have their terrors greatly enhanced by the gift to them of the essential bird characteristic, the power of soaring in mid-air, and thus gaining a great additional power for evil over their victims. We have already referred, in our first chapter, to the phoenix, and it now only remains to mention some few other mythical bird-forms, less widely known, before we pass to other creations of fancy. Even in heraldry, the home of much that is marvellous and unnatural, the bird forms depart but little from natural types, and the only instance to the contrary that occurs to us is the well-known Martlet, used not only as "a charge" in blazonry, but also as a mark of cadency to distinguish the arms of contemporary brothers in the same family or to identify different branches of the same family connection.[28]

[28] Appendix Q.

The martlet is very similar in form to a swallow, but is always represented as without feet, while the French heralds also deprive it of beak. A good early example of its use may be seen in the arms of William de Valence, emblazoned on his shield at Westminster, and dating from the year 1296; later instances of its employment are so common that it is hardly worth while to particularise any special illustration. The martlet, according to Gwillim, in his elaborate treatise on heraldry, "hath leggs exceeding short, that they can by no means go: and therefore it seemeth the Grecians do call them _Apodes, quasi sine pedibus_; not because they do want feet, but because they have not such use of their feet as other birds have. And if perchance they fall upon the ground, they cannot raise themselves upon their feet as others do, and so prepare themselves to flight. For this cause they are accustomed to make their Nests upon Rocks or other high Places, from whence they may easily take their flight, by means of the support of the Air. Hereupon it came that this Bird is painted in Arms without feet: and for this cause it is also given as a difference of younger Brethren, to put them in mind to trust to their wings of vertue and merit to raise themselves, and not to their leggs, having little Land to set their foot on."

In mediæval days the Bird of Paradise was in like manner thought to be without feet. The error arose in a very natural but most prosaic way, and simply sprang from the fact that the natives who bartered the skins of the birds with the merchants cut off the legs before bringing them, naturally thinking that they were of no value, and that it was for the richness of the plumage alone that the skins were esteemed. The lovers of the marvellous in the West built upon this weak foundation a most poetic superstructure, and believed that the bird was indeed the denizen of paradise, fed upon the dew of heaven, incapable of contact with earth, building no nest, but hatching its eggs in a cavity upon its own back; ever soaring in the sunlight far above earth, and independent of all mundane association.

Tavernier supplies another explanation, equally prosaic, of their footless condition--one in fact, that entirely removes the poor birds from all poetic association, and reduces them to the "drunk and incapable" state that some other bipeds are prone to indulge in. He tells us in his book that the birds of paradise come in flocks during the nutmeg season to the plantations, and that the odour so intoxicates them that they fall helplessly to the earth, and that the ants eat off their feet while they are thus incapacitated. Moore, in his "Lalla Rookh," thus refers, it will be remembered, to this Tavernier tale in writing of--

"Those golden birds that in the spice-time drop Upon the gardens drunk with that sweet food Whose scent hath lured them o'er the summer flood."

"The sublime bird which flies always in the air, and never touches the earth," mentioned by the princess in the introduction to "Paradise and the Peri," was the Humma, an altogether fabulous creature. Like the bird of paradise, it was supposed to pass its whole time in the blue vault of heaven, and to have no contact with earth; it was regarded as a bird of good omen, and that every head it overshadowed would in time be encircled with a crown. The splendidly jewelled bird suspended over the throne of Tippoo Sultan at Seringapatam was an artistic embodiment of this poetic fancy, and we can well imagine that all good courtiers who had any regard for keeping their necks free from the scimitar would take uncommonly good care to avoid that prophetic overshadowing, that would make them the possible rivals and successors of so very resolute an autocrat.

The Huppe, one of the birds believed in by our forefathers in mediæval days, seems morally to have been a somewhat peculiar and, on the whole, objectionable compound, reminding one in some degree of those uncomfortable people who attach an immense importance to their own belongings, but whose sympathies towards the members of the clan are scarcely more marked than their antipathy to all beyond this narrow circle. Such, at least, is the idea we should gather from the description of it by De Thaun, for he tells us that "when it sees its father or mother fallen into old age that they cannot see nor fly, it takes them under its wings and cherishes them. The huppe has such a nature that if any shall anoint a man with its blood while he is sleeping, devils will come and strangle him." The huppe was described as being like a peacock, but it seems impossible to even imagine how such a belief in its evil powers could ever have taken root. It would be difficult to conceive such a notion growing up in connection with any creature whatever, but when the first cause is itself non-existent the difficulty is greatly intensified; one has not even a foothold of fact as a starting-point. What a picture, again, of cold-blooded fiendishness does it not open out to us as we see with the mind's eye the treacherous anointing of some perchance innocent sleeper with a preparation of _Sanguis huppæ_ and then the operator walking off and posing in the eyes of the world as an honourable burgess, while his accomplices from the bottomless pit finish the job off for him while he has gone to Mass or is engaged on 'Change! It is worse even than that little affair with the babes in the wood, bad as that was in many of its details.

The Ibis, beloved as it was by the Egyptians for its services to them as the destroyer of venomous snakes, and from its association with the Sacred Nile and the great deity Thoth, was not altogether allowed to bring forth its progeny in peace, for it was believed that its fondness for a serpent diet might so develop in it evil properties, that its eggs were diligently sought for and destroyed, lest from them should issue some strange serpentine forms of horror that in their mysterious nature would be a still greater scourge than the sufficiently objectionable grey and brown and diversely spotted and chequered denizens of the desert that coil or glide unseen amidst the expanses of burning sand, and whose fangs convey swift death to those unfortunates who come within reach of their fatal power.

By far the grandest creation of bird-fancy is the Roc. This fabulous bird was of enormous size, and of such strength of talon and digestion that it was said to be able to carry away an elephant to its mountain home, and there devour it at a meal; while one old traveller, not to be outdone in particularity of detail, calculates that one roc's egg is equal in amount to one hundred and forty-eight hens' eggs. The belief in the roc was altogether an Eastern weakness, and those who would know more of it must turn to such romances as that of "Sindbad the Sailor" and the narratives of such-like Asiatic Barons Munchausen. In the Second Voyage of Sindbad he tells us how he saw in the distance some mysterious object, which, on closer inspection, proved to be the egg of a roc. "Casting my eyes," he says, "towards the sea, I could discern only the water and the sky; but perceiving on the land side something white, I descended from the tree, and taking with me the remainder of my provisions, I walked towards the object, which was so distant that at first I could not distinguish what it was. As I approached I perceived it to be a white ball of a prodigious size. I walked round it, to find whether there was an opening, but could find none; and it appeared so even that it was impossible to get up it. The circumference might be about fifty paces. The sun was then near setting; the air grew suddenly dark, as if obscured by a thick cloud. I was surprised at this change, but much more so when I perceived it to be occasioned by a bird of a most extraordinary size which was flying towards me. I recollected having heard sailors speak of a bird called a roc, and I conceived that the great white ball which had drawn my attention must be the egg of this bird. I was not mistaken, for shortly afterwards it alighted upon it and placed itself to sit upon it." He tells us also in this same voyage of the furious strife waged between the rhinoceros and the elephant, a struggle that often continues till the roc, hearing the disturbance, swoops down upon them and seizes them both in his claws and flies away with them, in much the same manner apparently as the schoolmaster who, appearing suddenly in the midst of a fight between two truculent youngsters, chills their martial ardour by his stony glance, and leads off each culprit by ear or collar to his den.

In another of Sindbad's sea-ventures, the fifth, we find an awful warning against trifling with the parental feelings of the roc. In the course of their voyage the crew landed on a desert island, and very soon found a gigantic egg. Sindbad at once recognised what it was, and earnestly advised them not to meddle with it, but his remonstrances were unheeded; they boldly attacked the mass with hatchets, and on finding a young roc within, cut it into divers pieces and roasted it. These reckless tars had scarcely finished their meal, when two immense clouds appeared in the air at a considerable distance. The captain, knowing by experience what this portended, or haply making a lucky guess, cried out that it was the father and mother of the young roc, and warned all to re-embark as quickly as possible, and so avoid, if possible, the vengeance of the outraged owners of the egg. All accordingly scrambled on board, and sail was set immediately. The two rocs in the meantime rapidly approached, uttering the most frightful screams, which they redoubled on finding the state of their egg, and that their young one was defunct. They then flew away, and a faint hope began to dawn upon the mariners that they had not come so badly out of the business after all, when to their blood-chilling horror the birds again rapidly approached, each with an enormous mass of rock in its talons. When they were immediately over the ship they stopped in mid-air, and one of them let fall the piece of rock he held. The pilot, his wits sharpened by the imminent peril the vessel was in, deftly turned the ship aside, and the great mass plunged into the depths of the sea alongside; but the other bird, more fortunate in his aim, let his piece fall so immediately on the ship that it smashed it into a thousand pieces, and, with the exception of Sindbad, all the passengers and crew were either crushed beneath tons of stone or drowned in the surging billows that such a monstrous mass created. Lest a suspicion may cross the reader's mind that the gallant sailor and enterprising merchant was romancing somewhat when he narrated these stirring adventures, we hasten to mention that the third calender, in the same veracious history, met with other experiences of an equally surprising nature in which this gigantic bird played as leading a part, all of which may be found duly set forth in the "Arabian Nights."

Another curious belief of the Arabs is in the existence of a bird called the Hameh. This uncomfortable creation of the Arab fancy is said to spring from the blood of a murdered man. Its weird cry is continuously "Iskoonee," a word signifying "give me to drink," and it rests not, day nor night, till its thirst is quenched in the murderer's blood. When the death of the victim is avenged it flies away to some place left altogether indefinite in the Eastern legend, but probably it wends its way to the spirit-land with the welcome news that the victim's blood no longer cries in vain for vengeance. To an Arab already suffering from an evil conscience the belief in the hameh must be a terrible one, as he hears in fancy the troubled air filled with the wailing cry and fierce demand for vengeance, and knows that, day or night, the haunting sound will never leave his ears until the desert feud be avenged and his own life blood be poured out like water upon the burning sand.

The depths of ocean, so impressive in their mystery and vastness, have been peopled by the lovers of the marvellous in all ages with a special fauna of their own, and have been made the home of divers strange and wondrous creatures, some purely reptilian, others fish-like, or still more commonly a weird combination of the two. The depths and recesses of the great tropical forests, as impressive almost in their vastness as the ocean itself, or the far-reaching swamps and morasses in their mysterious shades, have in like manner been tenanted in the imagination of the savage tribes that thread their depths or probe their treacherous surface with forms more wonderful even than those of Nature herself, weird and bizarre as these in tropical regions so frequently are. Hence amongst all savage tribes we find a belief in serpentine forms more terrible even than the boa or python that they have such cause to dread. The widely spreading worship of the serpent, a form of religion that we find in so many lands and throughout centuries of time, is a most interesting subject of study, though we can here only regret that exigencies of space compel us to do no more than merely mention it.

The belief in sea-serpents does not appear in itself to be an unreasonable one, much as it is from time to time ridiculed. Many species of tropical snakes are aquatic in a greater or less degree, and though some naturalists will tell us that a serpent is not adapted by its structure and organs for a purely aquatic existence, one finds in nature so many wonderful adaptations of form to abnormal circumstances, that it is perhaps wiser to feel that in the great and almost boundless expanse of ocean there may be mysterious forms that science has not yet tabulated and described, rather than to at once assert the contrary. Be this as it may, there is no doubt that while the great mystery of the ocean depths has been tenanted by the credulous with impossible creations of the fancy, we have numerous testimonies from sea-captains and others of appearances that cannot always be so lightly dismissed. A Captain Harrington, for instance, commanding the "Castilian," during a voyage from Bombay to Liverpool in the year 1857, sends the following account to the _Times_ newspaper:--"While myself and officers were standing on the lee side of the poop, looking towards the island of St. Helena, then some ten miles away, we were startled by the sight of a large marine animal, which reared its head out of the water within twenty yards of the ship, when it suddenly disappeared for about half a minute, and then made its appearance in the same manner again, showing us distinctly its neck and head about ten or twelve feet out of the water. Its head was shaped like a long buoy, and I suppose the diameter to have been seven or eight feet in the largest part, with a kind of scroll or tuft of loose skin encircling it about two feet from the top. The second appearance assured us that it was a monster of extraordinary length, which appeared to be moving slowly towards the island. The ship was going too fast to enable us to reach the mast-head in time to form a correct estimate of its extreme length, but from what we saw from the deck we conclude that it must have been over two hundred feet long. The boatswain and several of the crew, who observed it from the forecastle, state that it was more than double the length of the ship, in which case it must have been five hundred feet. Be that as it may, I am convinced that it belonged to the serpent tribe; it was a dark colour about the head, and was covered with several white spots. Having a press of canvas on the ship at the time, I was unable to round to without risk, and therefore was precluded from getting another sight of this leviathan of the deep." This precise description was endorsed by the chief and second officers of the ship--men, like the captain, of practised vision, and not at all likely to be deceived by floating sea-weed or any of the other matters brought forward to cast doubt on such stories.

It is curious that another apparently well-authenticated account of some such creature should also hail from the neighbourhood of St. Helena. Her Majesty's ship "Dædalus," in August 1848, when on the passage between that island and the Cape of Good Hope, came into close proximity with a strange-looking creature that was travelling through the water at an estimated speed of ten miles an hour. Captain McQuahee was unable, owing to the direction of the wind, to bring the ship into pursuit, but, as the creature passed within two hundred yards of them, they were enabled to bring it well within observation, its form and colour being distinctly visible from the vessel.

Olaus Magnus, Archbishop of Upsal some three centuries ago, was a firm believer in the marvellous, and in his writings, amongst many other things, he gives details of a sea-serpent two hundred feet long by twenty feet thick, having a dense hairy mane and eyes of fire. This monster, he further tells us, "puts up its head on high like a pillar and devours men." He also tells of another kind, that is forty cubits long and no thicker than a child's arm; this is blue and yellow in colour. His writings also furnish a more detailed account of a vast monster thrown ashore in 1532 on the English coast near "Tinmouth." This creature was ninety feet long and twenty-five feet thick, having thirty ribs on each side, a head twenty-one feet long, and two fins of fifteen feet each. This creature, from its proportions, fins, and so forth, was evidently not serpentine in character, though it may fairly be classed amongst monsters of the deep.

A Greenland missionary, Egede, tells in his journal of a frightful sea-monster that he saw on July 6, 1734. It raised itself so high out of the water, he says, that its head overtopped the mainsail. It had a long and pointed snout, and spouted like a whale; its fins were like great wings. Another very circumstantial account is that given by Captain Laurent de Ferry of Bergen in 1746. His creature had a horse-like head, raised some two feet out of the water; in colour it was grey, but it had a white mane and large black eyes. Seven or eight coils of the creature were visible, a fathom or so of space between each. De Ferry says that he shot at and wounded the monster, and that the water was reddened with its blood for some time after. He does not specify whether the weapon used was the longbow or not, but it seems highly probable that it was.

Where the account given is so exceedingly definite as it is, for example, in these two last instances, we are placed in the awkward predicament of either having to believe in the monster so graphically described, or to disbelieve the narrators of the stories; to conclude, in plain words, that Egede, despite his professions, was lying deliberately--a very Munchausen--and that De Ferry was either a credulous idiot himself, or wilfully concluded that the landsmen's credulity might be safely played upon.

It has been suggested that a long line of tumbling porpoises, rolling after each other in the quaint way that they do, may have deceived people into a belief that what they saw were the coils of one of these great mythical monsters of the deep; but, however such an appearance might deceive a landsman, it is evident that those who go down to the sea in ships and occupy themselves in the great waters are too familiar with the appearance of a shoal of porpoises to be thus deceived.

The ribbon fish may in some cases have given rise to the idea of a serpent of the sea, as the appearance of their elongated, band-like bodies swimming through the water with a gentle serpentine or undulatory motion would be very suggestive. They have been known to attain a length of sixty feet; specimens of this size have actually been captured by trawlers, though even yet we are a long way from the sea serpents gravely mentioned by Pontoppidan in his "Natural History of Norway" as being over six hundred feet long.

On the occasion of the reported appearance of the sea serpent to Captain McQuahee, Professor Owen in a letter published in the _Times_ suggested that the creature seen may have been one of the larger species of seals found in the Southern Seas. At the Falkland Islands and in the Kerguelen and Crozet groups the sea elephant attains a size of some twenty feet in length, and some such creature as this, swimming rapidly through a calm sea with its head raised, and with a long wake behind it, caused by the action of its paddles, placed at the posterior extremity of the body, like the screw of a steamer, may have been the foundation of some of the stories told of these mysterious monsters of the deep.

A good sea-serpent story is found in Captain Taylor's "Reminiscences." One day, when his ship was lying at anchor in Table Bay, "an enormous monster" about one hundred feet in length was seen advancing with snake-like motion round Green Point into the harbour. The head appeared to be crowned with long hair, and the keener-sighted amongst the observers could see the eyes and distinguish the features of the monster. The military were called out, and after peppering the object at a distance of five hundred yards, and making several palpable hits, it was observed to become quite still, and boats ventured off to complete the destruction. The "sea serpent" proved to be a mass of gigantic sea-weed, which had been undulated by the ground swell, and had become quiescent when it reached the still waters of the bay. Probably if mariners would attack the "monster" in the same manner whenever it is seen, we should hear little more of the sea serpent.

Stories of sea serpents are almost as old as the hills, and in many cases quite as difficult to digest.

In 1808 the body of a great sea monster was cast ashore at Stronsay, one of the Orkneys. This was some fifty feet long, and every one, even the fishermen themselves, declared that the sea serpent had turned up at last. A naturalist, however, decided that it was only an unusually fine specimen of the great basking shark; so we are as far off as ever, after all, from an authentic monster, and seem in every case to have only offered for our acceptance either outrageous hoaxes and impositions, the imaginations of the credulous, or, at the very best, cases of mistaken identity.

Amongst other serpent myths we may certainly place that most uncomfortable creation of the fancy, the Adissechen, a serpent with a thousand heads that, according to the Indian mythology, bears up the universe; and the Iormungandur, the serpent that according to the Scandinavian myth, encircles the whole earth, and binds it together in its flight through space.

It was a very old belief that the serpent's egg was hatched by the joint labour of several serpents, and was buoyed up into the air by their hissing. Any one so intrepid as to catch it while thus suspended 'twixt earth and heaven bore away with him a talisman of mighty power, giving him strength to prevail in every contest, and the favour of all whose favour was worth the having. It could only be captured at the gallop, and even then the risk of being stung to death was a peril most imminent. Pliny tells us that he had himself seen one of these notable proofs of prowess, and that it was about as large as a moderately large apple.

The Fire-Drake was, according to mediæval fancy, a fiery serpent or dragon, keeping guard over hidden treasure. The drake, of course, has no affinity with the familiar ducks and drakes on the farmer's pool, nor even with the ducks and drakes that people make of their money when they burn their fingers in too rash speculation, but is clearly suggested by the Latin word, _draco_, for a dragon. We find an interesting reference in Shakespeare to the word in his "Henry VIII.,"