“Nothing upon earth,” replied Martin, laughing, “but, like chameleons, upon air.”
“Upon insects,” said Prabu, “and little creatures so minute, that, although your eyes cannot detect them, float upon the surface of the sea.”
Then he explained to us that it was by some arrangement of the digestive organs that the bird produces from its bill the glutinous and clear-looking substance of which its nest is constructed; an explanation, to a certain extent, substantiated by the appearance of the nests, which in structure resemble long filaments of very fine vermicelli, coiled one part over the other without much regularity, and glued together by transverse rows of the same material. There was an old notion, that these nests—which, by the way, in form resemble the bowl of a large gravy-spoon, split in half longitudinally—were formed from sea-foam and other marine productions pulled up by the birds; but inasmuch as the edible-nest is found not only at the seaside, but in caves sixty or seventy miles in the interior, Prabu’s hypothesis seemed the most correct; but, then, to prove that, it should be discovered, by a skilful dissection, that the bird has some peculiar organ destined to perform the process of elaborating such a substance from its food. At present, neither naturalists nor natives make any distinction between the variety of swallows which affords the esculent nest, or any other.
As the prahu entered the creek, walled on one side by a perpendicular rock of at least 600 feet in height, Prabu made the blood run cold in our veins; for, pointing to a small dark spot about 200 feet above our heads, he said: “Yon hole is the entrance to one of the caves, and can only be reached from the top. What do my young masters think of nest-hunting now?”
“I sha’n’t think any more about it,” said I, with a shudder. “I wasn’t born a bird, and it’s an occupation only fit for eagles and Mother Carey’s chickens; or, at least, people ought to be invented with wings and strong claws for the express purpose.”
“Queer!” said Martin, thoughtfully, and scanning the rocks. “It’s a deuce of a height, or rather a depth, to be let down, with no ledge or abutment to rest upon, and this sea surging, foaming, and boiling in one’s ear! But then,” he added, his eyes brightening up, “it’s dangerous; it wants pluck, and that’s the thing for me. No danger, no fun. Besides, others do it, and, if so, why not me? I tell you what, Claud, we white fellows mustn’t show a feather the same color as our skin. Besides, we are always boasting about being superior to these darkies; therefore, we must prove now that we are at least their equals. We have begun, and we must go on.”
“My young master,” said Prabu, good-naturedly smiling at the allusion to the “darkies,” “does he know that the men who gather the nests have been trained from their childhood to climb rocks like tiger-cats, and that even of these one out of every five loses his life?”
“Bother! all right; don’t try to frighten a fellow. As you Mahommedans say, ‘What is written is written,’ we have begun, and we must go on; what we want in training, you know, we must find in pluck; and if you come to that,” he added, boastfully, “I sha’n’t fail—no, nor my brother, either, for all his pretending to be afraid of this, that, and the other; for in his quiet way, he is as plucky as any of us.”
“There is no real pluck, Martin,” said I, “in attempting that in which we know we must fail.”
“Ah! old fellow, but we never do know what will be a failure till we try,” he replied; and as he would have continued that line of argument the whole day, I dropped the subject.