To this all-absorbing abyss of devouring death, of famished life, what does God oppose to re-assure us? Another abyss, not less famished, thirsty of life, but less implacable to man. I see the Bird, and I breathe!
What! is it in you, ye living flowers, ye winged topazes and sapphires, that I shall find my safety? Your saving vehemence it is, excited to the purification of this superabundant and furious fecundity, that alone renders practicable the entrance to this dangerous realm of faëry. Were you absent, jealous Nature would perform her mysterious labour of solitary fermentation, and not even the most daring savant would venture upon observing her. Who am I here? And how shall I defend myself? What power would be sufficient? The elephant, the ancient mammoth, would perish defenceless against a million of deadly darts. Who will brave them? The eagle or the condor? No; a people far more mighty—the intrepid and the innumerable legion of fly-catchers.
Humming-birds, colibris, and their brothers of every hue, live with impunity in these gleaming solitudes where danger lurks on every side, among the most venomous insects, and upon those mournful plants whose very shade kills. One of them (crested, green and blue), in the Antilles, suspends his nest to the most terrible and fatal of trees, to the spectre whose fatal glance seems to freeze your blood for ever, to the deadly manchineal.
Wonder of wonders! It is this parroquet which boldly crops the fruits of the fearful tree, feeds upon them, assumes their livery, and appears, from its sinister green, to draw the metallic lustre of its triumphant wings.
Life in these winged flames, the humming-bird and the colibri, is so glowing, so intense, that it dares every poison. They beat their wings with such swiftness that the eye cannot count the pulsations; yet, meanwhile, the bird seems motionless completely inert and inactive. He maintains a continual cry of hour! hour! until, with head bent, he plunges the dagger of his beak to the bottom of the flowers, exhausting their sweets and the tiny insects among them; all, too, with a motion so rapid that nothing can be compared to it—a sharp, choleric, extremely impatient motion, sometimes transported by fury—against what? against a great bird, which he pursues and hunts to the death; against an already rifled blossom, which he cannot forgive for not having waited for him. He rends it, devastates it, and scatters abroad its petals.
Leaves, as we know, absorb the poisons in the atmosphere; flowers exhale them. These birds live upon flowers, upon these pungent flowers, on their sharp and burning juices, in a word, on poisons. From their acids they seem to derive their sharp cry and the everlasting agitation of their angry movements. These contribute, and perhaps much more directly than light, to enrich them with those strange reflects which set one thinking of steel, gold, precious stones, rather than of plumage or blossoms.
The contrast between them and man is violent. The latter, throughout these regions, perishes or decays. Europeans who, on the borders of these forests, attempt the cultivation of the cacao and other colonial products, quickly succumb. The natives languish, enfeebled and attenuated. That part of earth where man sinks nearest the level of the beast is the scene of triumph of the bird, where his extraordinary pomp of attire, luxurious and superabundant, has justly won for him the name of bird of paradise.
It matters not! Whatever their plumage, their hues, their forms, this great winged populace, the conqueror and devourer of insects, and, in its stronger species, the eager hunter of reptiles, sweeps over all the land as man's pioneer, purifying and making ready his abode. They swim intrepidly on this vast sea of death—this hissing, croaking, crawling sea—on the terrible, miasmatic vapours, inhaling and defying them.
It is thus that the great sanitary work, the time-old combat of the bird against the inferior tribes which might long render the world uninhabitable by man, is continued throughout the earth. Quadrupeds, and even man, take in it but a feeble part. It is ever the war of the winged Hercules.