“‘Ah! it’s all true,’ cried my landlady, joining the circle of gapers; ‘Oh! la la! Ça me fait peur; ça me fait tr-r-r-r-embler!’
“‘Once I saw a man in a haycart try to kill one, and the bête jumped right off the ground at a bound and fastened itself on the man’s face, when he stood on the haycart, and nothing could detach it till the man fell dead.’
“‘Ah! c’est bien vrai,’ cried Abigail; ‘they ought to have fetched a mirror and held it up to the bête, and then it would have left the man and jumped at its image.’
“The end of all this commotion was that, while I went to inquire of a scientific friend whether there was any truth in these tissue of bêtises, the whole household was in an uproar, tout en émoi, and they sent for a commissionnaire, and an ostler with a spade and mattock, and threw out my poor bête into the road and foully murdered it, chopping it into a dozen pieces by the light of a stable lantern; and then they declared that they could sleep in peace!—les miserables!
“But there were sundry misgivings as to my fate, and, as with the Apostle, ‘they looked when I should have swollen or fallen down dead suddenly;’ and next morning the maids came stealthily and peeped into my room to see whether I was alive or dead, and were not a little surprised that I was not even gonflé, or any the worse for my rencontre with a sourd.
“And so it turned out that my poor little bête that had caused such a disturbance was nothing more nor less than a salamander—a poor, inoffensive, harmless reptile, declared on competent authority to be noways venomous, but whose unfortunate appearance and somewhat Satanic livery have exposed it to obloquy and persecution.”
As the French word sourd primarily means one who is deaf, we get a curious parallelism of ideas between the salamander deaf to all sense of pity, and insensible to all but its own fell purpose, and the old idea of the deafness of the poisonous adder. “Deaf as an adder” is a common country saying, and the passage in the Psalms of David where we read that “the deaf adder stoppeth her ears, and will not heed the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely,” naturally rises to one’s mind. The deafness, it will be noted, is no mere lack of the hearing faculty, but a wilful turning away from gentle influence. It was an old belief that when the asp heard the voice of the serpent-charmer it stopped its ears by burying one of them in the sand and coiling its folds over the other.
In turning over the quaint pages of the “Bestiary” of De Thaun we find allusion made to a creature that is evidently the salamander again, though we cannot quite make out the reference to King Solomon. Like all such books written in the Middle Ages, everything is introduced to point some moral or religious truth, though it may at first seem difficult for our readers to realise what possible connection there can be between the dreaded “sourd” and any spiritual instruction. The reference is as follows:—“Ylio is a little beast made like a lizard. Of it says Solomon that in a king’s house it ought to be and to frequent, to give an example. It is of such nature that if it come by chance where there shall be burning fire it will immediately extinguish it. The beast is so cold and of such a quality that fire will not be able to burn where it shall enter, nor will trouble happen in the place where it shall be. A beast of such quality signifies such men as was Ananias, as was Azarias, and as was Misael, who served God fairly: these three issued from the fire praising God. He who has faith only will never have hurt from fire.”[12]
Like the salamander, the Griffin was to our forefathers no mere creature of the imagination. Ctesias describes them in all sober earnestness as “birds with four feet, of the size of a wolf, and having the legs and claws of a lion. Their feathers are red on the breast and black on the rest of the body.” Glanvil says of them, “The claws of a griffin are so large and ample that he can seize an armed man as easily by the body as a hawk a little bird. In like manner he can carry off a horse or an ox, or any other beast in his flight.” The creature is, if anything, still more terrible when met with in the description given by Sir John Mandeville:—“Thai have the body upward as an egle, and benethe as a lyoun, but a griffonne hath the body more gret, and is more strong than eight lyouns, and more grete and strongere than an hundred egles such as we have among us. For he hath his talouns so large and so longe and grete upon his fete as though thei weren homes of grete oxen, so that men maken cuppes of them to drinken of.” Oriental writers, who appear to have an especial delight in the marvellous, go even beyond this, and the creature becomes with them the roc, the terrible creature we read of, for example, in the wonderful adventures of “Sindbad the Sailor.” Milton introduces the creature very finely in his noble poem, as for instance:—