Among other excellent things in Hanauer’s Tales from Palestine[[43]] is the following report of Solomon’s contest with a dove:
“In the southern wall of the Kubbet ’es-Sakhra [at Jerusalem], the mosque that now stands near the site of the ancient Temple, on the right side of the door as one enters there is a gray slab framed in marble of a dark color. It contains a figure, formed by natural veins in the stone, which is distinct enough to be taken for a picture of two doves perched facing each other on the edge of a vase. With this picture is connected a tale....
“The great king Solomon understood the language of beasts, birds and fishes, and, when he had occasion to do so, would converse with all of them. One day, soon after he had completed the Temple, as he was standing at a window of the royal palace, he overheard a conversation between a pair of birds that were sitting on the housetop. Presently the male, who was evidently trying to impress the female with his importance, exclaimed: ‘Solomon is a conceited fool! Why should he be so vain of this pile of buildings he has raised? I, if I wished, could kick them all over in a few minutes.’
“The king, greatly enraged by this pompous speech, summoned the offender into his presence and demanded what he meant by such an outrageous boast. ‘Your majesty,’ replied the bird, ‘will, I am sure, forgive my audacity, when I explain that I was in the company of a female; since your majesty doubtless knows from experience that in such circumstances the temptation to boast is almost irresistible.’ The monarch, forgetting his anger in his amusement, said with a smile: ‘Go your way this time, but see that you do not repeat the offence,’ and the bird, after a profound obeisance, flew away to rejoin his mate.
“He had hardly alighted before the female, unable to repress her curiosity, eagerly inquired why he had been summoned to the palace. ‘Oh,’ said the impudent boaster, ‘the king heard me tell you that if I chose I could kick down all his buildings in no time, and he sent for me to beg me not to do it.’
“Solomon, who, of course, heard this remark also, was so indignant at the incorrigible vanity of its author that he at once turned both birds into stone. They remain to this day as a reminder of the saying: ‘The peace of mankind consists in guarding the tongue.’”
But the stories of Solomon and his bird-friends are many. He was evidently a jolly old soul, and tradition says that when he travelled across the desert clouds of birds formed a canopy to protect him from the sun. The hoopoe, a high-crested bird that figures largely in other fanciful tales of the East, tells wise Solomonic stories, and is still regarded by Saharan nomads as possessed of peculiar virtues. The great Jewish king, whose reality is almost hidden under the legendary mantle, is said to have chosen the hoopoe, the cock and the pewit: the first because of its wit, the second in admiration of its cry, and the third because, says Hanauer, it can see through the earth, and could tell him where fountains of water could be found. The last preference is natural in an arid region, the pewit being a water-bird, the familiar lapwing-plover; and as it annually migrates through Palestine into Ethiopia it is reasonable that it should be fabled to be the means of bringing Solomon and the Queen of Sheba together, as is described in Chapter XXVII of the Koran. It should be noted that all of these birds are crested.
The veneration given to doves by the Mohammedans at Mecca is accounted for elsewhere; but swallows are held in almost equal reverence by both officials and pilgrims at that great shrine of Islam, and build their nests in the haram. This respect is explained by Keane[[14]] as the result of a belief that they were the instruments by which Mecca was saved from the Abyssinian (Christian) army that is known to have invaded Arabia in the year of Mohammed’s birth, and to have been disastrously expelled. The tradition is that God sent flocks of swallows, every bird carrying three small stones in its beak and two in its claws, which were dropped on the heads of the Abyssinians, and miraculously penetrated the bodies of men and elephants until only one of the invaders was left alive. He fled back to his country, and had just finished telling of the disaster to the king when one of the swallows, which had followed him from Mecca, dropped its pebble and killed him too. The kernel of this dramatic story is in the nineteenth section of the Koran:[[59]] “And he sent against them birds in flocks (ababils), claystones did he hurl down at them.” The historical explanation is that the Abyssinian invaders were destroyed by small-pox, the pustules of which are called in Arabic by a word meaning “small stones.”
Of a piece with these traditions and the Rabbinical tales of the Jews are the monkish legends preserved in early British chronicles, such as that by the Venerable Bede or by William of Malmesbury. The orthodox as well as dissenters had trouble with birds. Among the traditions of the celebrated Scotch-Irish missionary Columba (Latinized from his baptismal name Colum, “dove”) is one that once in his ardent youth Colum was trying to make by stealth in a church a copy of the psalter in possession of the selfish king, Finian of Donegal, who had refused the young enthusiast that privilege. A meddlesome stork, confined within the church, informed the sacristan, and Colum was arrested. Nevertheless by divine aid he got his copy, helpful to him afterward in his beneficent work in the Scottish highlands.
One of the prettiest of these old stories is that of St. Kenneth and the gulls.[[22]] One day about A. D. 550 the blackheaded gulls, flying as usual along the coast of Wales, and scanning the sea sharply for food or anything else interesting to a gull, found floating in a coracle—a round, wickerwork canoe—a human baby a day or two old, contentedly asleep on a pallet made of a folded purple cloth. Several gulls seized the corners of this cloth and so carried the child to the ledge of the Welsh cliff where they nested, plucked feathers from their breasts to make a soft bed, laid the baby on it, then hastened to fly inland and bring a doe to provide it with milk, for which an angel offered a brazen bell as a cup. There the blessed waif lived for several months; but one day, in the absence of all the gulls, a shepherd discovered the infant and took him down to his hut and his kind wife. The gulls, returning from the sea, heard of this act from the doe. They at once rushed to the shepherd’s cottage, again lifted the babe by the corners of its purple blanket, and bore him back to the ledge of their sea-fronting crag. There he stayed until he had grown to manhood—a man full of laughter and singing and kind words; and the Welsh peasants of the Gower Peninsula revered him and called him Saint Kenneth.