In mediæval days the Bird of Paradise was in like manner thought to be without feet. The error arose in a very natural but most prosaic way, and simply sprang from the fact that the natives who bartered the skins of the birds with the merchants cut off the legs before bringing them, naturally thinking that they were of no value, and that it was for the richness of the plumage alone that the skins were esteemed. The lovers of the marvellous in the West built upon this weak foundation a most poetic superstructure, and believed that the bird was indeed the denizen of paradise, fed upon the dew of heaven, incapable of contact with earth, building no nest, but hatching its eggs in a cavity upon its own back; ever soaring in the sunlight far above earth, and independent of all mundane association.
Tavernier supplies another explanation, equally prosaic, of their footless condition—one in fact, that entirely removes the poor birds from all poetic association, and reduces them to the “drunk and incapable” state that some other bipeds are prone to indulge in. He tells us in his book that the birds of paradise come in flocks during the nutmeg season to the plantations, and that the odour so intoxicates them that they fall helplessly to the earth, and that the ants eat off their feet while they are thus incapacitated. Moore, in his “Lalla Rookh,” thus refers, it will be remembered, to this Tavernier tale in writing of—
“Those golden birds that in the spice-time drop
Upon the gardens drunk with that sweet food
Whose scent hath lured them o’er the summer flood.”
“The sublime bird which flies always in the air, and never touches the earth,” mentioned by the princess in the introduction to “Paradise and the Peri,” was the Humma, an altogether fabulous creature. Like the bird of paradise, it was supposed to pass its whole time in the blue vault of heaven, and to have no contact with earth; it was regarded as a bird of good omen, and that every head it overshadowed would in time be encircled with a crown. The splendidly jewelled bird suspended over the throne of Tippoo Sultan at Seringapatam was an artistic embodiment of this poetic fancy, and we can well imagine that all good courtiers who had any regard for keeping their necks free from the scimitar would take uncommonly good care to avoid that prophetic overshadowing, that would make them the possible rivals and successors of so very resolute an autocrat.
The Huppe, one of the birds believed in by our forefathers in mediæval days, seems morally to have been a somewhat peculiar and, on the whole, objectionable compound, reminding one in some degree of those uncomfortable people who attach an immense importance to their own belongings, but whose sympathies towards the members of the clan are scarcely more marked than their antipathy to all beyond this narrow circle. Such, at least, is the idea we should gather from the description of it by De Thaun, for he tells us that “when it sees its father or mother fallen into old age that they cannot see nor fly, it takes them under its wings and cherishes them. The huppe has such a nature that if any shall anoint a man with its blood while he is sleeping, devils will come and strangle him.” The huppe was described as being like a peacock, but it seems impossible to even imagine how such a belief in its evil powers could ever have taken root. It would be difficult to conceive such a notion growing up in connection with any creature whatever, but when the first cause is itself non-existent the difficulty is greatly intensified; one has not even a foothold of fact as a starting-point. What a picture, again, of cold-blooded fiendishness does it not open out to us as we see with the mind’s eye the treacherous anointing of some perchance innocent sleeper with a preparation of Sanguis huppæ and then the operator walking off and posing in the eyes of the world as an honourable burgess, while his accomplices from the bottomless pit finish the job off for him while he has gone to Mass or is engaged on ’Change! It is worse even than that little affair with the babes in the wood, bad as that was in many of its details.
The Ibis, beloved as it was by the Egyptians for its services to them as the destroyer of venomous snakes, and from its association with the Sacred Nile and the great deity Thoth, was not altogether allowed to bring forth its progeny in peace, for it was believed that its fondness for a serpent diet might so develop in it evil properties, that its eggs were diligently sought for and destroyed, lest from them should issue some strange serpentine forms of horror that in their mysterious nature would be a still greater scourge than the sufficiently objectionable grey and brown and diversely spotted and chequered denizens of the desert that coil or glide unseen amidst the expanses of burning sand, and whose fangs convey swift death to those unfortunates who come within reach of their fatal power.
By far the grandest creation of bird-fancy is the Roc. This fabulous bird was of enormous size, and of such strength of talon and digestion that it was said to be able to carry away an elephant to its mountain home, and there devour it at a meal; while one old traveller, not to be outdone in particularity of detail, calculates that one roc’s egg is equal in amount to one hundred and forty-eight hens’ eggs. The belief in the roc was altogether an Eastern weakness, and those who would know more of it must turn to such romances as that of “Sindbad the Sailor” and the narratives of such-like Asiatic Barons Munchausen. In the Second Voyage of Sindbad he tells us how he saw in the distance some mysterious object, which, on closer inspection, proved to be the egg of a roc. “Casting my eyes,” he says, “towards the sea, I could discern only the water and the sky; but perceiving on the land side something white, I descended from the tree, and taking with me the remainder of my provisions, I walked towards the object, which was so distant that at first I could not distinguish what it was. As I approached I perceived it to be a white ball of a prodigious size. I walked round it, to find whether there was an opening, but could find none; and it appeared so even that it was impossible to get up it. The circumference might be about fifty paces. The sun was then near setting; the air grew suddenly dark, as if obscured by a thick cloud. I was surprised at this change, but much more so when I perceived it to be occasioned by a bird of a most extraordinary size which was flying towards me. I recollected having heard sailors speak of a bird called a roc, and I conceived that the great white ball which had drawn my attention must be the egg of this bird. I was not mistaken, for shortly afterwards it alighted upon it and placed itself to sit upon it.” He tells us also in this same voyage of the furious strife waged between the rhinoceros and the elephant, a struggle that often continues till the roc, hearing the disturbance, swoops down upon them and seizes them both in his claws and flies away with them, in much the same manner apparently as the schoolmaster who, appearing suddenly in the midst of a fight between two truculent youngsters, chills their martial ardour by his stony glance, and leads off each culprit by ear or collar to his den.
In another of Sindbad’s sea-ventures, the fifth, we find an awful warning against trifling with the parental feelings of the roc. In the course of their voyage the crew landed on a desert island, and very soon found a gigantic egg. Sindbad at once recognised what it was, and earnestly advised them not to meddle with it, but his remonstrances were unheeded; they boldly attacked the mass with hatchets, and on finding a young roc within, cut it into divers pieces and roasted it. These reckless tars had scarcely finished their meal, when two immense clouds appeared in the air at a considerable distance. The captain, knowing by experience what this portended, or haply making a lucky guess, cried out that it was the father and mother of the young roc, and warned all to re-embark as quickly as possible, and so avoid, if possible, the vengeance of the outraged owners of the egg. All accordingly scrambled on board, and sail was set immediately. The two rocs in the meantime rapidly approached, uttering the most frightful screams, which they redoubled on finding the state of their egg, and that their young one was defunct. They then flew away, and a faint hope began to dawn upon the mariners that they had not come so badly out of the business after all, when to their blood-chilling horror the birds again rapidly approached, each with an enormous mass of rock in its talons. When they were immediately over the ship they stopped in mid-air, and one of them let fall the piece of rock he held. The pilot, his wits sharpened by the imminent peril the vessel was in, deftly turned the ship aside, and the great mass plunged into the depths of the sea alongside; but the other bird, more fortunate in his aim, let his piece fall so immediately on the ship that it smashed it into a thousand pieces, and, with the exception of Sindbad, all the passengers and crew were either crushed beneath tons of stone or drowned in the surging billows that such a monstrous mass created. Lest a suspicion may cross the reader’s mind that the gallant sailor and enterprising merchant was romancing somewhat when he narrated these stirring adventures, we hasten to mention that the third calender, in the same veracious history, met with other experiences of an equally surprising nature in which this gigantic bird played as leading a part, all of which may be found duly set forth in the “Arabian Nights.”
Another curious belief of the Arabs is in the existence of a bird called the Hameh. This uncomfortable creation of the Arab fancy is said to spring from the blood of a murdered man. Its weird cry is continuously “Iskoonee,” a word signifying “give me to drink,” and it rests not, day nor night, till its thirst is quenched in the murderer’s blood. When the death of the victim is avenged it flies away to some place left altogether indefinite in the Eastern legend, but probably it wends its way to the spirit-land with the welcome news that the victim’s blood no longer cries in vain for vengeance. To an Arab already suffering from an evil conscience the belief in the hameh must be a terrible one, as he hears in fancy the troubled air filled with the wailing cry and fierce demand for vengeance, and knows that, day or night, the haunting sound will never leave his ears until the desert feud be avenged and his own life blood be poured out like water upon the burning sand.
The depths of ocean, so impressive in their mystery and vastness, have been peopled by the lovers of the marvellous in all ages with a special fauna of their own, and have been made the home of divers strange and wondrous creatures, some purely reptilian, others fish-like, or still more commonly a weird combination of the two. The depths and recesses of the great tropical forests, as impressive almost in their vastness as the ocean itself, or the far-reaching swamps and morasses in their mysterious shades, have in like manner been tenanted in the imagination of the savage tribes that thread their depths or probe their treacherous surface with forms more wonderful even than those of Nature herself, weird and bizarre as these in tropical regions so frequently are. Hence amongst all savage tribes we find a belief in serpentine forms more terrible even than the boa or python that they have such cause to dread. The widely spreading worship of the serpent, a form of religion that we find in so many lands and throughout centuries of time, is a most interesting subject of study, though we can here only regret that exigencies of space compel us to do no more than merely mention it.