The storks, after alighting, stood upon the shore in erect attitudes—apparently as unconcerned about the presence of our three adventurers, as if the latter were only overgrown stalks of the Pythagorean bean—utterly incapable of doing them an injury.
Chapter Fifty Six.
The adjutants.
The brace of gigantic birds, that had thus alighted by the shore of the little lake, were, to say the least, uncouth creatures; for the whole ornithological world might be ransacked without finding a greater oddity than the adjutant.
In the first place, it stands six feet upon its long, straight shanks; though its actual length, measuring from the tip of its bill to the termination of its claws, is full seven and a half. The beak, of itself, is over a foot in length, several inches in thickness, with a gibbous enlargement near the middle, and having both mandibles slightly curved downwards.
The spread of a full-grown adjutant’s wing is fifteen feet, or five yards, from tip to tip—quite equalling in extent either that of the Chilian condor or the “wandering” albatross.
In colour the adjutant may be described as black above and white underneath, neither (that) being very pure. The upper plumage is a dirty brownish black; while the belly and under parts present a dull white appearance,—partly from an admixture of greyish feathers, but also from the circumstance that the bird is usually bedaubed with dirt—as mud from the marshes, where it feeds, and other filth, in which it seems to take delight. But for this foulness, the legs of the adjutant would be of a dark colour; but in the living bird they are never seen of the natural hue—being always whitened by the dust shaken out of its plumage, and other excrement that attaches itself to the skin.
The tail is black above and white underneath—more especially the under coverts, which are of a pure white. These last are the plumes so highly prized under the name of “marabout feathers,” an erroneous title, arising through a mistake—made by the naturalist Temminck in comparing the Indian adjutant with another and very different species of the same genus—the marabout stork of Africa.