All the dead birds, most of which she recognized as birds of passage, reminded her of the weariness of winter, the season when the wave-washed island is immersed in fog.
There were screech-owls, the pale-yellow owls that live in church-steeples and at night drink the oil in the church-lamps; vultures that come down from the Alps and Pyrenees in times of excessive cold; the ash-colored vulture that lives at Sainte-Baume. There are little tomtits, called serruriers (locksmiths), which are found only on the banks of the Rhône, and pendulines, so called because they hang their nests like little pendulums from the flexible branches swaying to and fro above the water; and stocking-makers, whose nests resemble the tissue of a knitted stocking; and the alcyon, that is to say, the bleuret or kingfisher; and the siren, of the brilliant diversified plumage, called also honey-eater, which flies north in the month of May, and spends its winters by preference in Camargue. There was a stork, that probably considered Camargue, between the dikes of the Rhône, a little like Holland. There, too, was the heron with its frill of delicate feathers, falling like a long fringe over its throat. Livette knew it only by the name of galejon, bestowed upon it in that neighborhood because the herons’ favorite place of assemblage was the pond of Galejon. There was one that bore on its pedestal the date: 1807, and the words: Purchased at Arles market; it was of a bluish slate color, and had on its head three slender black feathers, a foot in length. Then there were flamingoes galore, for they sometimes build their nests by myriads in the marshes of Crau, sitting astride their nests which are as tall as their legs. And the divers! and grebes! and penguins, which are seldom seen! And the rascally pelican, called by the people thereabouts grand gousier!
Livette fancied that she could hear in the distance the mournful, heart-rending cry of the birds of passage, rising above the roar of the wind and the sound of the river shedding its tears into the ocean; dominating the mysterious sounds that fill the darkness. How many times had she heard the cries of cranes and petrels and Egyptian curlews over the Château d’Avignon in the season when the nights are long, when the sight of the fire rejoices the heart like a living thing full of promise, when the blackness of death envelops the world. The birds remind her also of the Christmas evenings, the evenings when the logs blazing in the huge fire-place and the many lamps seem to say: “Courage! the night will pass.” And it is then that the wheat shows its green stalk, saying likewise: “Yes, courage! bad weather, like all other, comes to an end at last.”
Livette mused thus, and mechanically raised her eyes to the ceiling, from which the crocodile was hanging.[7]
Livette did not say to herself that there was, somewhere on the other side of the great sea, in the same Egypt to which Saint Joseph and the Virgin Mary fled to protect the Child Jesus from the persecution of King Herod, a great river, the mighty brother of the Rhône, and that in the hottest hours of the day, on the islands in the Nile, the crocodiles crawl in great numbers out upon the overheated sands to expose their backs to the rays of a sun as hot as any oven.
She did not say to herself that Saint Sara, the swarthy patron saint of the gipsies, is called by them the Egyptian, and that they water their gaunt horses in the Nile as well as in the Rhône. She could not say to herself—because she knew it not—that the Egyptians inherit from the Hindoos a debased sort of magic, and that it was the same sort, even more debased without doubt, that gave Zinzara her power.
Nor did Livette know that Zinzara carried in one of the boxes in her ambulatory house—between a crocodile from the Nile and a sacred ibis, both found in an Egyptian crypt—the mummy of a young girl, six thousand years old, whose face, from which the bandages had been taken, wore a mask of gold. She could conceive no connection between the ibis of the Nile and yonder creature of the same name killed within the year on the shore of the Vaccarès, but she underwent the influence of all these mysterious connecting currents to which space and time are naught.
The lifeless creatures, scattered all about her, lived again by virtue of the power of retaining their form forever. And fear seized upon her, for suddenly the mad idea, at once vague and precise, entered her mind of a resemblance between the profile of the great reptile hanging from the ceiling and the lower part of the gipsy queen’s face.
Livette thought that she must be ill, and rose to go, determined to wait no longer, but as she put out her hand to the door she uttered a cry. A centipede was crawling along the key, as lively as you please. She recoiled, and saw upon the white wall, at about the level of her head, a tarente, that seemed to be watching her with its pale-gray eyes. The tarente is inoffensive, but Livette knew nothing of that. It is the Mauritanian gecko, which abounds in Provence, a reptile repugnant to the sight, with gray protuberances on the head and back like those upon cantaloupe melons. And then the little fellow, the tiny creature, resembles the crocodile!—Surely, Livette has the fever.
“What’s the matter, my child?”