Part 8
Egypt does more for them; she reveres, she loves them. If the ancient worship no longer exists, they receive from men as kindly an hospitality as in the time of Pharaoh. Ask an Egyptian fellah why he allows himself to be infested and deafened by birds? why he so patiently endures the insolence of the crow posted on his buffalo's horn or his camel's hump, or gathering on the date-palms in flocks and beating down the fruit?--he will answer nothing. To the bird everything is lawful. Older than the Pyramids, he is the ancient inhabitant of the country. Man is there only through his instrumentality; he could not exist without the persistent toil of the ibis, the stork, the crow, and the vulture.
Hence arises an universal sympathy for the animal, an instinctive tenderness for all life, which, more than anything else, makes the charm of the East. The West has its peculiar splendours--in sun and climate America is not less dazzling; but the moral attraction of Asia lies in the sentiment of unity which you feel in a world where man is not divorced from nature; where the primitive alliance remains unbroken; where the animals are ignorant that they have cause to dread the human species. Laugh at it if you will; but there is a gentle pleasure in observing this confidence--in seeing the birds come at the Brahmin's call to eat from his very hand--in watching the apes on the pagoda-roofs sleeping in domestic peace, playing with or suckling their little ones in as much security as in the bosom of their native forests.
"At Cairo," remarks a traveller, "the turtle-doves know so well they are under the protection of the public, that they live in the midst of the very clamour of the city. Every day I see them cooing on my window-shutters, in a very narrow street, at the entrance of a noisy bazaar, and at the busiest moment of the year, a little before the Ramadan, when the ceremonies of marriage fill the city day and night with uproar and tumult. The level roofs of the houses, the usual promenade of the prisoners of the harem and their slaves, are in like manner haunted by a crowd of birds. The eagles sleep in confidence on the balconies of the minarets."
Conquerors have never failed to turn into derision this gentleness, this tenderness for animated nature. The Persians, the Romans in Egypt, our Europeans in India, the French in Algeria, have often outraged and stricken these innocent brothers of man, the object of his ancient reverence. A Cambyses slew the sacred cow; a Roman the ibis or cat which destroyed unclean reptiles. But what means the cow? The fecundity of the country. And the ibis? Its salubrity. Destroy these animals, and the country is no longer habitable. That which has saved India and Egypt through so many misfortunes, and preserved their fertility, is neither the Nile nor the Ganges; it is respect for animal life, the mildness and the gentle heart of man.
Profound in meaning was the speech of the priest of Saïs to the Greek Herodotus: "You shall be children ever."
We shall always be so--we, men of the West--subtle and graceful reasoners, so long as we shall not have comprehended, with a simple and more exhaustive view, the reason of things. To be a child is to seize life only by partial glimpses. To be a man is to be fully conscious of all its harmonious unity. The child disports himself, shatters, and spurns; he finds his happiness in undoing. And science in its childhood does the same; it cannot study unless it kills; the sole use which it makes of a living miracle is, in the first place, to dissect it. None of us carry into our scientific pursuits that tender reverence for life which nature rewards by unveiling to us her mysteries.
Enter the catacombs, where, to employ our haughty language, the rude monuments sleep of a barbarous superstition; visit the treasure-stores of India and Egypt; at each step you meet with naïve but not the less profound intuitions of the essential mystery of life and death. Do not let the form deceive you; do not look upon this as an artificial work, fabricated by a priestly hand. Under the strange complexity and burdensome tyranny of the sacerdotal form, I see two sentiments everywhere revealing themselves in a human and pathetic manner:--
_The effort to save the loved soul_ from the shipwreck of death;
_The tender brotherhood of man and nature_, the religious sympathy for the dumb animal as the divine instrument in the protection of human life.
The instinct of antiquity perceived what observation and science declare: that the Bird is the agent of the grand universal transition, and of purification--the wholesome accelerator of the interchange of substances. Especially in burning countries, where every delay is a peril, he is, as Egypt said, the barque of safety which receives the dead spoil, and causes it to re-enter the domain of life and the world of purity.
The fond and grateful Egyptian soul has recognized these benefits, and wishes for no happiness which it cannot share with the animals, its benefactors. It does not desire to be saved alone. It endeavours to associate them in its immortality. It wills that the sacred bird accompany it to the sombre realm, as if to bear it on its wings.
DEATH.
BIRDS OF PREY.--(THE RAPTORES).
It was one of my saddest hours when, seeking in nature a refuge from the thoughts of the age, I for the first time encountered the head of the viper. This occurred in a valuable museum of anatomical imitations. The head, marvellously imitated and enormously enlarged, so as to remind one of the tiger's and the jaguar's, exposed in its horrible form a something still more horrible. You seized at once the delicate, infinite, fearfully prescient precautions by which the deadly machine is so potently armed. Not only is it provided with numerous keen-edged teeth; not only are these teeth supplied with an ingenious reservoir of poison which slays immediately; but their extreme fineness, which renders them liable to fracture, is compensated by an advantage that perhaps no other animal possesses; namely, a magazine of supernumerary teeth, to supply at need the place of any accidentally broken. Oh, what provision for killing! What precautions that the victim shall not escape! What love for this horrible creature! I stood by it _scandalized_, if I may so speak, and with a sick soul. Nature, the great mother, by whose side I had taken refuge, shocked me with a maternity so cruelly impartial.
Gloomily I walked away, bearing on my heart a darker shadow than rested on the day itself, one of the sternest in winter. I had come forth like a child; I returned home like an orphan, feeling the notion of a Providence dying away within me.
Our impressions are not less painful when we see in our galleries the endless series of birds of prey, prowlers by day and night, frightful masks of birds, phantoms which terrify the day itself. One is powerfully affected by observing their cruel weapons; I do not refer to those terrible beaks which kill with a blow, but those talons, those sharpened saws, those instruments of torture which fix the shuddering prey, protract the last keen pangs and the agony of suffering.
Ah! our globe is a barbarous world, though still in its youth; a world of attempts and rude beginnings, given over to cruel slaveries--to night, hunger, death, fear! Death? We can accept it; there is in the soul enough of hope and faith to look upon it as a passage, a stage of initiation, a gate to better worlds. But, alas, was pain so useful as to render it necessary to prodigalize it? I feel it, I see it, I hear it everywhere. Not to hear it, to preserve the thread of my thoughts, I am forced to stop up my ears. All the activity of my soul would be suspended, my nerves shattered by it; I should effect nothing more, I should no longer move forward; my life and powers of production would remain barren, annihilated by pity!
"And yet is not pain the warning which teaches us to foresee and to anticipate, and by every means in our power to ward off our dissolution? This cruel school is the stimulant and spur of prudence for all living things--a powerful drawing back of the soul upon itself, which otherwise would be enfeebled by happiness, by soft and weakening impressions.
"May it not be said that happiness has a centrifugal attraction which diffuses us wholly without, detains us, dissipates us, would evaporate and restore us to the elements, if we wholly abandoned ourselves to it? Pain, on the contrary, if experienced at one point, brings back all to the centre, knits closer, prolongs, ensures and fortifies existence.
"Pain is in some wise the artist of the world which creates us, fashions us, sculptures us with the fine edge of a pitiless chisel. It limits the overflowing life. And that which remains, stronger and more exquisite, enriched by its very loss, draws thence the gift of a higher being."
These thoughts of resignation were awakened by one who was herself a sufferer, and whose clear eye discerned, even before I myself did, my troubles and my doubts.
As the individual, said she again, so is the world. Earth itself has been benefited by Pain. Nature begot her through the violent action of these ministers of death. Their species, rapidly growing rarer and rarer, are the memorials, the evidences of an anterior stage of the globe in which the inferior life swarmed, while nature laboured to purge the excessive fecundity.
We can retrace in thought the scale of the successive necessities of destruction which the earth was thus constrained to undergo.
Against the irrespirable air which at first enveloped it, vegetables were its saviours. Against the suffocating and terrific density of these lower vegetable forms, the rough coating which encrusted it, the nibbling, gnawing insect, which we have since execrated, was the sanitary agent. Against the insect, the frog, and the reptile mass, the venomous reptile proved an useful expurgator. Finally, when the higher life, the winged life, took its flight, earth found a barrier against the too rapid transports of her young fecundity in the powerful voracious birds, eagles, falcons, or vultures.
But these useful destroyers have diminished in numbers as they have become less necessary. The swarms of small creeping animals on which the viper principally whetted his teeth having wonderfully thinned, the viper also grows rare. The world of winged game being cleared in its turn, either by man's depredations or by the disappearance of certain insects on which the small birds lived, you see that the odious tyrants of the air are also decreasing; the eagle is seldom met with, even among the Alps, and the exaggerated and enormous prices which the falcon fetches, seems to prove that the former, the noblest of the raptores, has now-a-days nearly disappeared.
Thus nature gravitates towards a less violent order. Does this mean that death will ever diminish? Death! no; but pain surely.
The world little by little falls under the power of the Being who alone understands the useful equilibrium of life and death, who can regulate it in such wise as to maintain the scale even between the living species, to encourage them according to their merit or innocence--to simplify, to soften, and (if I may hazard the word) to moralize death, by rending it swift, and freeing it from anguish.
Death was never our serious objection. Is it more than a simple mask of life's transformations? But pain is an objection, grave, cruel, terrible. Therefore, little by little, it will disappear from the earth. Its agents, the fierce executioners of the life which they plucked out by torture, are already very rare.
Assuredly, when I survey, in the Museum, the sinister assemblage of nocturnal and diurnal birds of prey, I do not much regret the destruction of these species. Whatever pleasure our personal instincts of violence, our admiration of strength, may cause us to take in these winged robbers, it is impossible to misread in their deathlike masks the baseness of their nature. Their pitifully flattened skulls are sufficient evidence that, though greatly favoured with wing, and crooked beak, and talons, they have not the least need to make use of their intelligence. Their constitution, which has made them swiftest of the swift, strongest of the strong, has enabled them to dispense with address, stratagem, and tactic. As for the courage with which one is tempted to endow them, what occasion have they to display it, since they encounter none but inferior enemies? Enemies? no; victims! When the rigour of the season, or hunger, drives their young to emigrate, it leads to the beak of these dull tyrants countless numbers of innocents, very superior in every sense to their murderers; it prodigalizes the birds which are artists, and singers, and architects, as a prey to these vulgar assassins; and for the eagle and the buzzard provides a banquet of nightingales.
The flattened skull is the degrading sign of these murderers. I trace it in the most extolled, in those whom man has the most flattered, and even in the noble falcon; noble, it is true, and I the less dispute the justice of the title, because, unlike the eagle and other executioners, it knows how to kill its prey at a blow, and scorns to torture it.
These birds of prey, with their small brains, offer a striking contrast to the numerous amiable and plainly intelligent species which we find among the smaller birds. The head of the former is only a beak; that of the latter has a face. What comparison can be made between these brute giants and the intelligent, all-human bird, the robin redbreast, which at this very moment hovers about me, perches on my shoulder or my paper, examines my writing, warms himself at the fire, or curiously peers through the window to see if the spring-time will not soon return.
If there be any choice among the raptores, I should certainly prefer--dare I say it?--the vulture to the eagle. Among the bird-world I have seen nothing so grand, so imposing, as our five Algerian vultures (in the Jardin des Plantes), posted together like so many Turkish pachas, adorned with superb cravats of the most delicate white down, and draped in noble mantles of gray. A solemn divan of exiles, who seem to discuss among themselves the vicissitudes of things and the political events which have driven them from their native country.
What real difference exists between the eagle and the vulture? The eagle passionately loves blood, and prefers living flesh, very rarely eating the dead. The vulture seldom kills, and directly benefits life by restoring to its service and to the grand current of vital circulation the disorganized objects which would associate with others to their disorganization. The eagle lives upon murder only, and may justly be entitled the minister of Death. On the contrary, the vulture is the servant of Life.
Owing to his strength and beauty, the eagle has been adopted as an emblem by more than one warrior race which lived, like himself, by rapine. The Persians and the Romans chose him. We now associate him with the lofty ideas which these great empires originate. Grave people--even an Aristotle--have accredited the absurd fable that he daringly eyed the sun, and put his offspring to the test, by making them also gaze upon it. Once started on this glorious road, the philosophers halted no more. Buffon went the furthest. He eulogizes the eagle for his _temperance_. He does not eat at all, says he. The truth is, that when his prey is large, he feasts himself on the spot, and carries but a small portion to his family. The king of the air, says he again, _disdains small animals_. But observation points to a directly opposite conclusion. The ordinary eagle attacks with eagerness the most timid of beings, the hare; the spotted eagle assails the duck. The booted eagle has a preference for field mice and house mice, and eats them so greedily that he swallows them without killing them. The bald-headed eagle, or pygargo, will frequently slay his own young, and often drives them from the nest before they can support themselves.
Near Havre I have observed one instance of truly royal nobility, and, above all, of sobriety, in an eagle. A bird, captured at sea, but which has fallen into far too kindly hands in a butcher's house, is so gorged with an abundance of food obtained without fighting, that he appears to regret nothing. A Falstaff of an eagle, he grows fat, and cares no longer for the chase, or the plains of heaven. If he no longer fixedly eyes the sun, he watches the kitchen, and for a titbit allows the children to drag him by the tail.
If rank is to be decided by strength, the first place must not be given to the eagle, but to the bird which figures in the "Thousand and One Nights" under the name of _Roc_, the condor, the giant of gigantic mountains, the Cordilleras. It is the largest of the vultures--is, fortunately, the rarest--and the most destructive, as it feeds only on live prey. When it meets with a large animal, it so gorges itself with meat that it is unable to stir, and may then be killed with a few blows of a stick.
To judge these species truly we must examine the eyrie of the eagle, the rude, ill-constructed platform which serves for its nest; compare this rough and clumsy work--I do not say with the delicate _chef-d'oeuvre_ of a chaffinch's nest--but with the constructions of insects, the excavations of ants, where the industrious workman varies his art to infinity, and displays a genius so singular in its foresight and resources.
The traditional esteem which man cherishes for the courage of the great Raptores is much diminished when we read, in Wilson, that a tiny bird, a fly-catcher, such as the purple martin, will hunt the great black eagle, pursue it, harass it, banish it from its district, give it not a moment's repose. It is a truly extraordinary spectacle to see this little hero, adding all his weight to his strength, that he may make the greater impression, rise and let himself drop from the clouds on the back of the large robber, mount without letting go, and prick him forward with his beak in lieu of a spur.
Without going so far as America, you may see, in the Jardin des Plantes, the ascendancy of the little over the great, of mind over matter, in the singular tête-à-tête of the gypaetus and the crow. The latter, a very feeble animal, and the feeblest of birds of prey, which in his black garb has the air of a pedagogue, labours hard to civilize his brutal fellow-prisoner, the gypaetus. It is amusing to observe how he teaches him to play--humanizes him, so to speak--by a hundred tricks of his own invention, and refines his rude nature. This comedy is performed with special distinction when the crow has a reasonable number of spectators. It has appeared to me that he disdains to exhibit his _savoir-faire_ before a single eye-witness. He calculates upon their assistance, earns their respect in case of need. I have seen him dart back with his beak the little pebbles which a child had flung at him. The most remarkable pastime which he teaches to his big friend is, to make him hold by one end a stick which he himself draws by the other. This show of a struggle between strength and weakness, this simulated equality, is well adapted to soften the barbarian, and though at first he gives but little heed to it, he afterwards yields to continued urgency, and ends by throwing himself into the sport with a savage good temper.
In the presence of this repulsively ferocious figure, armed with invincible talons and a beak tipped with iron, which would kill at the first blow, the crow has not the least fear. With the security of a superior mind, before this heavy mass he goes, he comes, he wheels about, he snatches its prey before its eyes; the other growls, but too late; his tutor, far more nimble, with his black eye, metallic and lustrous as steel, has seen the forward movement; he leaps away; if need be, he climbs a branch or two higher; he growls in his turn--he admonishes his companion.
This facetious personage has in his pleasantry the advantage due to the seriousness, gravity, and sadness of his demeanour. I saw one daily, in the streets of Nantes, on the threshold of an alley, which, in his demi-captivity, could only console himself for his clipped wings by playing tricks with the dogs. He suffered the curs to pass unmolested; but when his malicious eye espied a dog of handsome figure, worthy indeed of his courage, he hopped behind him, and, by a skilful and unperceived manoeuvre, leapt upon his back, gave him, hot and dry, two stabs with his strong black beak: the dog fled, howling. Satisfied, tranquil, and serious, the crow returned to his post, and one could never have supposed that so grim-looking a fellow had just indulged in such an escapade.
It is said that in a state of freedom, strong in their spirit of association, and in their numbers, they hazard the most audacious games, even to watching the absence of the eagle, stealing into his redoubtable nest, and robbing it of the eggs. And, what is more difficult to believe, naturalists pretend to have seen great troops of them, which, when the eagle is at home, and defending his family, deafen him with their cries, defy him, entice him forth, and contrive, though not without a battle, to carry off an eaglet.
Such exertions and such danger for this miserable prey! If the thing be true, we must suppose that the prudent republic, frequently troubled or harassed by the tyrant of the country, decrees the extinction of his race, and believes itself bound by a great act of devotion, cost what it may, to execute the decree.
Their sagacity is shown in a thousand ways, especially in the judicious and well-weighed choice of their abode. Those which I observed at Nantes, on one of the hills of the Erdre, passed over my head every morning, and returned every evening. Evidently they had their town and country houses. By day they perched on the cathedral towers to make their observations, ferreting out (_éventant_) what good things the city might have to offer. At close of day, they regained the woods, and the well-sheltered rocks where they love to pass the night. These are domiciliated people, and no mere birds of passage. Attached to their family, especially to their mates, to whom they are scrupulously loyal, their peculiar dwelling-place should be the nest. But the dread of the great birds of night decides them to sleep together in twenties or thirties--a sufficient number for a combat, if such should arise. Their special object of hate and horror is the owl; when day breaks, they take their revenge for his nocturnal misdeeds: they hoot him; they give him chase; profiting by his embarrassment, they persecute him to death.
There is no form of association by which they do not know how to profit. That which is sweetest--the family--does not induce them to forget, as you may see, the confederacy for defence or the league for attack. On the contrary, they associate themselves even with their superior rivals, the vultures, and call, precede, or follow them, to feed at their expense. They unite--and this is a stronger illustration--with their enemy the eagle; at least, they surround him to profit by his combats, by the fray in which he triumphs over some great animal. These shrewd spectators wait at a little distance until the eagle has feasted to his satisfaction, and gorged himself with blood; when this takes place, he flies away, and the remainder falls to the crows.