Part 6

Here in front all over the water were crowds of little birds, wild ducks maybe, dotted singly, fishing for themselves, and right away lay the flocks of flamingoes, flushing rose as they stood, flashing scarlet as they wheeled, till the flocks on the horizon looked like a sunset cloud. Late in the spring I passed again, and saw not the birds but the reason of the birds. The first time it had been a brilliant, sparkling morning, the second time it was a scarlet sunset. Where the rose-tinted flocks had touched the sky the sun now set behind bars, and where the little birds had floated singly the Arabs were drawing a net--the dark figures, each with his fisher’s coat girt round him, stood out against the crimsoned water; as they drew in round after round the silver fish leaped against the meshes, and the sound of their rustling came up to our ears as the train halted.

It is but the lean kine that the Israelites have left in the land of Goshen; yet if I was a tethered beast with scanty pasture I should feel some little comfort in having for company such a vision of whiteness as the paddy bird. To unaccustomed eyes it seems the image of the ibis, though it is not really the same; and it runs in and out over the parched fields, among the heads of the cattle.

There is peace in Cairo now among the Easterns and the Westerns, but there never can be peace between the kites and crows. The feud is carried on in the tops of the palm trees of the gardens. In one fierce contest the bone of contention fell to the ground and I went to find the cause of this eternal feud. It was no more and no less than a dead rat. At the river side they have ample material for contention, and I have seen as many as fifty great hawks or kites together hovering about the masts of the boats.

The kites are seen at their best in a little desert city near. There is not so much noise but that you can hear their musical whistle, and watch their great stately quadrilles in the air, three or four wheeling, poising, passing with swoops and curves against the blue.

A lovelier, more peaceful little bird haunts the palm gardens--the cinnamon and ashen dove which seeks the woods of England in the summer. Ten of them came home by our own boat one spring. They crept on behind it on wearied wing till we pitied them, and hoped they would alight and rest. Suddenly we all saw a sailing ship a mile or two away. With one accord the doves turned and made towards it, but not liking it on nearer view they turned again, caught us up without the least trouble, and again limped along on the wing beside us. But we were comforted for their fatigue.

In November the waters round Cairo had only just gone down, and the fields near Gizeh were all mud. When evening fell there used to come a wedge-shaped flock of pelicans from the desert. The great birds wheeled round the top of Chufu’s pyramid, and went off to their fishing.

Each little village up the Nile has its own pigeon tower built four-square, and bristling with sticks for the birds to perch. All the village owns these towers, and round them the pretty flocks clap their wings and take their brisk flights, merry and quick as Arab boys.

The long lines of herons in the water are more typical of the meditative side of Oriental character. They stand out in long grey lines, on long yellow spits of sands in the slow, great curves of the river. But no bird can boast one half the resolute patience of the Griffin Vulture. Round some long curves of the Nile I saw the great grey birds stand; as we drew slowly nearer we could distinguish five, of which two were standing opposite to one another with immense wings spread, ready to fight. When we came opposite it was seen that they were quarrelling about a dead sheep; as we drew away they were still exchanging the _retort courteous, the quip modest, the reply churlish, the reproof valiant and the countercheck quarrelsome;_ and we were out of sight again before either gave _the lie direct_. Indeed, for all I know, they may still be typifying the _Concert of Europe_.

The Egyptian vulture is much smaller and much more attractive than this abhorred great bird. _Rachen_, white with black-edged wings, has a beauty of his own as he circles luminously against the sky; there is even a horrid grandeur about him as he springs into sight from the blue, and beats steadily up the wind, allured by carrion scent among the sandhills.

But of all the birds at Luxor the bee-eater is perhaps the loveliest and the pied kingfisher the most lovable. This kingfisher is dappled white and grey, he poises over water in the position of the dove in stained-glass windows; his wings are lifted fluttering, his head bent down. So he hovers intent and busy, careless of those who pass, till he has perfectly found his aim. Then he drops as a stone falls, the waters close above his head, and in a moment he emerges with a fish curving silver from his bill. If “our loves remain” my spirit will sometimes seek a little horseshoe lake with thick green water, above which sit a parliament of lion-headed goddesses, and there it will watch this kingfisher hover and poise and fall. At this place I once saw our own kingfisher, but he is a travelled fellow and has lost the fearless, busy confidence of the grey native; he does his fishing on the sly, and went by like a blue flash to hide behind some carven stone. And I do not know how soon the pied fisher will learn to follow his example. A German, who thought himself a sportsman, also loved these kingfishers, but, as Browning says, it was “another way of love.” He came home one day with a bunch hanging from his hand. I do not know if he took them home and stuffed them to look like nature; more probably he tired of the little grey bodies and threw them away. They would not be so pretty when the soul was gone.

And some men, Englishmen too, have been known to shoot the bee-eater. This is a small light-green bird, as green as growing corn. From its tail hang two long dark feathers; it has a long black beak, with a stripe passing by the eye across paler cheeks. There are some kinds more brilliantly coloured than this; the beauty of it is most manifest when it is bee-eating. Then it spreads bronze wings, turns and flutters like a butterfly, and as it turns a gold sheen ripples over the green. These are sociable birds, and they sit by half-dozens on a branch of carob, taking turns to flutter and catch.

Compared to this bird the crowned hoopoe himself seems almost gross. He is at ease again, since Solomon took back his gift, and the crown of feathers is raised and lowered with a jaunty, self-sufficient air. Where the market road of Luxor ran out into the fields, close by the hole dug by an Arab weaver in the middle of the way to set his loom in, was a favourite place for the hoopoes, and here you might see two or three together, as large as thrushes, with bodies coloured like the russet jay, fine curving bills, and the gay crest. But if you wish to love a hoopoe do not watch it when it eats a thick-bodied moth.

Over the plain of Thebes the swallow plays, glancing by; you hail him as a fellow countryman, but foreign travel would seem to have altered his customs and driven away his dear domestic habits. The old Egyptians carved on stone two little birds like swallows, but one had a wing curled upwards, and one had a straighter wing; and whereas the latter symbolised greatness, the former portended evil. One would need all the wisdom of Egypt to know what mystery lies behind the curling of the wing.

Through the fields another merry bird comes into sight--the crested lark, which is so bold that it will hardly move from the path your donkey takes; or it sits among the corn blades as you go by, and runs but a few steps as you canter past. The birds are tame, because the Arabs do not kill them; Mohammed took a very narrow view of the subject, and it is left to Englishmen and Germans to check the excessive familiarity of birds and men, and to try to make nature more normal.

If these rarer birds are tame, our own bold sparrows are a hundred times more impudent. As the Arab waiters clear away the breakfast they chase the sparrows out through the doors; if you sleep with shutters open you may expect to find a sparrow or two sitting on your bed when you wake; they pry into your cupboard if the doors are left open; they pull a thread out of the mat near your feet to make a nest behind the electric bell wires in the hall; and one determined pair set themselves to build behind the books in our bookcase. We pulled the nest to pieces many times, but they had us at last, and we found two eggs laid upon a wisp of hay.

There is another bedroom visitor with better manners--namely, the little grey owl who mews high up in the palm tree; he does not make himself so common as the sparrow, but in my bedroom one evening he appeared on the window-sill, bowed about a dozen times and went out again.

The wagtails do not come indoors, but outside they will follow and wait for crumbs; will stand with pulsing tail while one lunches at the corner of some temple, running after the scraps of bread thrown to them and waiting to clear the remnants of the feast. The grey wagtail is the commoner, and the plump yellow wagtail is a rare shy visitor. On board ship he catches something more of the spirit of comradeship.

What more can one tell of the cuckoo with spangled crest, whose spangles can be stroked off and come back again; of the chat with rosy breast, of the oriole of golden plumage. The air is still in this country so that you may hear the voices of the past speak silently; and the very song of the birds is hushed in the land of the rustling of wings.

EPILOGUE

“_Imperfect qualities throughout creation, Suggesting some one creature yet to make._”

I

It is time that the old question of the superiority of cat or dog should be discussed on some other ground than that of British feeling or human egotism.

The case of the cat is prejudged if we are to weigh his merits on practical grounds, for the cat is a dreamer and a dramatist; or if we are to estimate his character from the point of view of Western civilisation, for the cat, as William Watson says, is the type of the Orient; or, finally, if we are to consider the moral qualities of the cat solely in relation to the desires of the human being. If these are our premisses then the vulgar estimate of the cat is the true one.

According to this estimate the cat is a domestic comfortable creature, usually found curled up like the ammonite, and in a state of semi-torpor; it is essentially selfish and essentially cruel, but apart from these two drawbacks, essentially feminine. “The cat is selfish, and the dog is faithful.” This sums up a judgment founded on wilful ignorance and gross egotism.

In respect to what is the dog faithful and the cat selfish? Simply in this regard, that the dog takes the vainest man on something better than his own estimate, while of the cat’s life and world the human being forms but a little part.

Here plainly Greek meets Greek, and we had better let the accusation of egotism alone. But apart from this point, the above summary of the cat’s nature is about as true as the following summary of the sportsman’s nature from the cat’s point of view.

“The sportsman is a quiet, domestic creature, fond of his comforts and his meals; he is generally found smoking in an armchair before the fire. The only thing which interferes with his domesticity is his tendency to absent himself from the house for hours together; this appears to be the result of a curious mania quite foreign to his nature; and it will cause him even to miss his meals. If you come upon him at such times he is engaged in a prosaic kind of wholesale slaughter; he has no exciting chases after his prey, no display of ability, no well-planned ambushes; but he kills at a distance through an unpleasantly noisy instrument. The sportsman, too, is absolutely dangerous to life at such time, and I have known cats fall victims to his rage; whereas, if you meet him in his normal condition, he is usually quite tame; you can safely leave kittens in the room with him, and I have never known him kill a caged bird. The keeper is a very dangerous sort of sportsman, and must be regarded as radically unsafe. The difference between sportsmen and keepers is much the same as that between capricious bulls and mad bulls.”

The fact is, that the usual judgment of cats rests on a total misapprehension of the scope of a cat’s life; and the root of the misunderstanding goes wider and deeper than this. The average human being takes account only of those qualities of animals which have some practical bearing on human life; even the animal lover is wont to take account only of animal qualities, physical, mental, and, at a stretch, moral; whereas that which is the pivot of human life and human relations; that which, rudimentary as it is in animals, is still the pivot of animal qualities--namely, the force of personality--is altogether left out of account.

No judgment of animals can be adequate, or in any sense true, which does not take account of personality, more or less developed, and of the scope of the creature’s life as determined by it.

The more intimately one knows animals, the more one is struck by their individuality, and the varying force of their personality.

Persis had the most intense personality of any animal I have ever known. Mentu’s, less vivid, was still as individual and distinct; Ra had a little narrow nature, Alexander was undeveloped, and the tabby is frankly common; but all are as distinct from one another, as essentially personal, as five human beings.

And it is greatly through this personality that the scope of an animal’s life, as of the life of the human being, is determined; we are all more or less at the mercy of what we, in our blindness, call “blind forces;” but in all of us there is something which out of the “manifold” of the world seeks and selects a consistent experience, some principle which determines the scope of life.

Out of the many chemicals of the soil each plant draws those which are appropriate to its own life, each plant transforms them into a living thing, a definite beauty of leaf and bud.

And the alchemy of the higher creature does not only transform the material particles of the world, now into the ashen silky hair and yellow eyes of Mentu, now into the curly grizzled coat of Taffy; but through the intelligence and sensibilities, through the desire for approbation and of admiration, through the protective love of the offspring, and the pure straining after the affection of the human being, dimly understood, these dawning consciousnesses gather from the world of sensation, of intelligence, of emotion, such material as they can assimilate and transform, defining it into a life and world of their own.

If we cannot from the point of more developed moral consciousness, and higher intelligence, even seek to understand the dawnings in the lower creatures of that which makes us what we are, then to us animals are mere playthings or mere slaves, and we can have no least perception of what is meant by that earnest, if unrealised, “expectation of the creature.”

II

“_All instincts immature, All purposes unsure._”

The difference between different races of animals appears to lie very greatly in the different scope of their lives.

The cat’s life, as distinguished from the dog’s, is essentially independent; and this, combined with finer sensibilities and a less facile intelligence, give a predominance in the cat of these elements of character which as developed in the human being we call the artistic temperament.

The cat is, above all things, a dramatist; its life is lived in an endless romance though the drama is played out on quite another stage than our own, and we only enter into it as subordinate characters, as stage managers, or rather stage carpenters.

We realise this with kittens; we see that the greater part of their life, of the sights and sounds of it, are the material of a drama half consciously played; they are determined to make mysteries, and as a child will seize upon the passing light or shadow to help him to transform some well-known object into the semblance of living creature, so you may see the kitten reach a paw again and again to touch a reflection on a polished floor, or conjure the shadows of evening into the forms of enemies.

We cannot but see this, and our mistake comes later when the kitten passes partly out of our ken to reappear from time to time, a serious, furtive creature with the weight of the world on its shoulders. We think then that the romance has ceased, when it has in reality gone deeper; the stage has widened out of sight, and if the cat no longer plays before us it is because we have lost sympathy with this side of its life; if we encourage it, it will play like a kitten up to old age. This same fact possibly explains the reason of the theory that cats care for places and not for people--it may be because these same people care for kittens and not for cats; thus the cat transfers the affection it might have felt for the human being to the scene of its romances and the places where it has experienced the surprise and joy of its kittens.

Corresponding to the dramatic instinct the cat appears to have its sensibilities more developed in the direction of æsthetic enjoyment than the dog’s, which are almost purely utilitarian. But it is a strange fact that the most universal kind of æsthetic enjoyment among animals--namely, the pleasures of music--seem to be keenest among those races which comparatively we rank low in respect of intelligence--namely, reptiles and birds.

I whistled “God Save the Queen” once to two green lizards in an Italian garden; they drew by little runs and jerks out of their holes, and their paths converged. Suddenly when their nerves were tense with excitement of the air (rendered slightly out of tune) they saw each other, sprang with one impulse together, bit until I saw the green skin wrinkle, rolled over and disappeared. I have never seen either cat or dog show anything approaching to the emotion which music produces in Joey, though Persis showed some pleasurable excitement in whistling, and some desire to try the notes of a piano for herself. Dogs for the most part take the pleasures of music with extreme seriousness almost amounting to gloom. It is not uncommon to find dogs who will “sing,” following to some small extent the air as it rises or falls. But they do this with an aspect of extreme melancholy, and a thrill sometimes seems to run through the whole body before the sound is produced; that they do not absolutely dislike it can only be judged from the fact that they do not try to go away.

Both dogs and cats appear to be unconscious of the sounds they utter until experience has taught them the result or until their attention has been specially directed to it. I have indeed met a Scotch terrier who would “sing” to order, but his face expressed a painful tension of will. To do him justice he sang a strain or two with apparent ease under my window in the middle of the night. Frequently, too, a dog who wishes to make his presence realised has his voice strangulated by nervousness like a shy girl at a music lesson; and a well-bred cat anxious to attract attention sometimes opens its mouth silently.

All such facts seem to point to the conclusion that many animals do not produce their voices voluntarily, but solely on physical impulse; that even imitative utterance may often be based on some such physical sensation, as many people feel a tremble in the throat when a Bourdon stop is on the organ. If this be so we are on the wrong tack in comparing the sounds of animals, however varied and specified they may be, to language, and we should rather compare them to weeping, groaning, sighing, yawning, and laughter, which in the same way produce an imitative response, which are by nature involuntary, and have no tendency to develop into definite language.

If cats and dogs have, compared with other creatures, little feeling for music, they seem to have still less for pleasures of sight. I have known a mare which again and again at the same place seemed to look out with pleasure over a view, when no definite object was moving to catch her eye, but I have never known a dog do this, and though a cat often takes up this attitude, the focus of her eyes seems to be more definitely fixed, and she is probably attracted by some movement too minute to arrest our attention. To colour they seem still more indifferent, not sharing even the susceptibility of the mad bull. I have heard indeed of a dog preferring scarlet to light blue; but it is impossible with a single instance to eliminate individual association. Cats, however, though showing no susceptibility to colour, show a very clear perception of texture. It is not necessarily the most strictly comfortable textures that are preferred; velvet may do to sleep on, but it is on thin crackling paper or stiff silk that a cat would choose to sit, and, above all, to eat. And contrary to all expectation, woolly textures are chosen to lick. A cat has been known to go round the garden in order to lick the soft underside of foxglove leaves; and will even tear a paper wrapper in order to be able to stroke flannelette with his tongue. As flannelette is prepared with a poisonous chemical this pleasure is hazardous.

But the real region of æsthetic pleasure for a cat is the region of smell. The dog uses smell as a medium of information; the cat revels in it. The dog smells the ground to trace friend or foe, food or prey, but the cat will linger near a tree-trunk, smelling each separate aromatic leaf. If the window of a close room is opened the cat goes to it, and puts her head out to sniff the air; she will smell the dress of a friend, partly for recognition no doubt, but apparently partly for pleasure also. An aromatic smell is pleasant; a strong spirituous smell not only disagreeable but absolutely painful. Lavender water or eau-de-cologne may please a tiger but will put a cat to flight.

The cat’s drama is a drama of the twilight, when the earth refreshed gives up her secret, subtle scents. It is not to be played in broad daylight; it is a mystery play of things half revealed, subtly transformed, hardly understood, secretly suggestive.

III

“_But when she came back the dog was laughing._”

Counterbalancing the rudimentary powers of æsthetic pleasure in the cat, we find in the dog a more facile intelligence, and a far more adaptable nature. Some boast that they have taught tricks to a cat; but the fact shows not so much that the cat was intelligent and docile as that its owners were; for their ability has been usually to seize on some natural movement of the cat, in jumping or in sitting up, and gradually to induce the animal to exaggerate it. But the tricks we teach a dog are against his nature, and it needs not only intelligence but docility to take a savoury bite and abstain from swallowing until the precisely right word is pronounced.

A cat walks about with a great purpose dimly imagined in its brain, but a dog plans; he is “the low man adding one to one,” but his sums are the most correct, for he is of a practical nature. He does not have to pretend that a stick is alive before he can glean pleasure from playing with it.