It [the anka] is known only by name, and is so called from having a white line round the neck like a collar; some say because of the length of the neck.... It is said that the inhabitants of the city of Res ... had in their country a mountain called Demaj, a mile high. There came a very large bird with a very long neck, of beautiful and divers colors. This bird was accustomed to pounce on all the birds of that mountain, and eat them up. One day he was hungry and birds were scarce, so he pounced on a child and carried it off. He is called ankamogreb because he carries off the prey he seizes.... Soon after this he was struck by a thunderbolt.
Mohammed is reported to have said that at the time of Moses God created a female bird called anka; it had eight wings like the seraphs, and bore the figure of a man. God gave it a portion of every thing, and afterwards created it a male. Then God made a revelation to Moses that he had created two extraordinary birds, and had assigned for their nourishment the wild beasts around Jerusalem. But the species multiplied, and when Moses was dead they went to the land of Nejd and Hijaz, and never ceased to devour the wild beasts and to carry off children till the time when Khaled, son of Senan Abasi, was Prophet, between the time of Christ and Mohammed. It was then that these birds were complained of. Khaled invoked God, and God did not permit them to multiply, and their race became extinct.
This characteristic Bedouin camp-fire novelette reminds us at once of the famous roc, or “rukh,” to adopt the more correct spelling, with which we are familiar from the story in the Arabian Nights of Sinbad the Sailor. Let me quote it succinctly from Payne’s edition.[[87]] Sinbad had sailed on a commercial venture from his home in Basra, a port on the Persian Gulf, and the ship had stopped at a very pleasant island, situation unrecorded. Sinbad went ashore with others, wandered in the lovely woods, fell asleep, and awoke to find the ship gone and himself the only person on the island. As he was exploring the place rather timidly he came to a great shining dome, but could see no doorway. “As I stood,” he relates, “casting about how to gain an entrance, the sun was suddenly hidden from me and the air became dark....”
So I marvelled at this, and lifting my head looked steadfastly at the sun, when I saw that what I had taken for a cloud was none other than an enormous bird whose outspread wings, as it flew through the air, obscured the sun and veiled it from the island. At this sight my wonder redoubled, and I bethought me of a story I had heard aforetime of pilgrims and travellers, how in certain islands dwells a huge bird, called the roc, which feeds its young on elephants, and was assured that the dome aforesaid was none other than one of its eggs. As I looked ... the bird alighted on the egg and brooded over it, with its wings covering it and its legs spread out behind it on the ground, and in this posture it fell asleep, glory be to Him who sleepeth not!
When I saw this I arose, and unwinding the linen of my turban twisted it into a rope with which I girt my middle, and bound myself fast to his feet.
Sinbad’s purpose was to get himself carried away to some better place, but when, next morning, the roc did bear him aloft and afar, and finally alighted, the sailor found himself in a horrid desert. After many further adventures and voyages Sinbad revisits his island yet does not recognize it until the men with whom he is strolling bade him look at a great dome. Not knowing what it was they broke it open with stones, “whereupon much water ran out of it, and the young roc appeared within; so they pulled it forth of the shell and killed it, and took of it great store of meat.” Dreadful misfortune followed this inconsiderate act.
This was a well-known Arabic wonder-tale. The author of one of their popular old books of “marvels,” several of which exist, tells almost exactly Sinbad’s story as happening to himself, and at least two other Arabic works are said to contain the tale with picturesque variations. In later times the home of the monster was placed in Madagascar. Marco Polo, the adventurous Italian, who in the 13th century wandered overland to China, and whose Travels[[89]] are a fine mixture of fact and fancy, had a fair idea of where Madagascar was, and recorded much that he was told about it—mostly erroneous. He relates that the people of that island report “That at a certain season of the year ... the rukh makes its appearance from the southern region.... Persons who have seen this bird assert that when the wings are spread they measure sixteen paces in extent.” Marco says that he heard that the agents of the Grand Khan took to him a feather ninety spans long. It is explained in Yule’s edition of Polo’s Travels that the supposed roc’s feather was one of the gigantic fronds of the raphia palm “very like a quill in form.”
Such wonder-tales have a truly phenix-like quality of indestructibility. As late as the time of Charles I of England there lived in Lambeth, on the Surrey side of London, John Tradescant, renowned as traveller and florist, who accumulated an extensive “physic-garden” and museum of antiquities and curiosities. He was a man of science, but to satisfy the popular taste of the time, as Pennant explains, his museum contained a feather alleged to be of the dragon, and another of the griffin. “You might have found here two feathers of the tail of the phoenix, and the claw of the rukh, a bird capable to trusse an elephant.” This collection after the death of Tradescant’s son in 1622, became the property of Elias Ashmole, and it was the nucleus of the Ashmolean Museum founded at Oxford in 1682.
But phenix, rukh, anka, simurgh, garuda, feng-huang and others that have not been mentioned, such as Yel, the mythical raven of our Northwest, and those of Malaya described by Skeat,[[7]] are all, apparently, members of the brood hatched ages ago in that same sunrise nest and still flying amid rosy clouds of prehistoric fable.
The first glimpse of them is on the seals and tablets recovered from Mesopotamian ruin-mounds. In the mystic antiquity of the Summerian kingdom of Ur and its capital-city Lagash, a gigantic eagle, “the divine bird Imgig” was the royal cognizance. In those days, as Dr. Ward[[23]] discloses from his study of the oldest Babylonian cylinders, people told one another tales of monstrous and fantastic birds of prey that could fly away with an antelope in each talon, and which fought, usually victoriously, against huge winged and feathered dragons with bodies like those of crocodiles, and sometimes with human heads. Such representations of demons were the prototypes of the grotesque combinations of animal features, and of men and animals, more familiar to us in the Egyptian Sphinx, the classic centaurs, and medieval angels and devils.