“_Oh! the land of the rustling of wings._”
“‘God made the country and man made the town;’ I prefer the latter,”
wrote a child. Man also made the Suez Canal and the ships upon it, and
God made the Salt Lakes and their navies, and most people still agree
with the child and prefer the former.
I had heard much about the first, and little about the second, when I
landed in Egypt one November and went by train to Ismailia. On the left
lay the famous little ditch, and the great ships looking incredibly
tiny crept along it; and on the right lay out the great shallow lakes,
and from the edge to the horizon they were as full of feathered fowl as
Mother Carey’s Peace Pool.
Here in front all over the water were crowds of little birds, wild
ducks maybe, dotted singly, fishing for themselves, and right away lay
the flocks of flamingoes, flushing rose as they stood, flashing scarlet
as they wheeled, till the flocks on the horizon looked like a sunset
cloud. Late in the spring I passed again, and saw not the birds but the
reason of the birds. The first time it had been a brilliant, sparkling
morning, the second time it was a scarlet sunset. Where the rose-tinted
flocks had touched the sky the sun now set behind bars, and where the
little birds had floated singly the Arabs were drawing a net--the dark
figures, each with his fisher’s coat girt round him, stood out against
the crimsoned water; as they drew in round after round the silver fish
leaped against the meshes, and the sound of their rustling came up to
our ears as the train halted.
It is but the lean kine that the Israelites have left in the land of
Goshen; yet if I was a tethered beast with scanty pasture I should feel
some little comfort in having for company such a vision of whiteness as
the paddy bird. To unaccustomed eyes it seems the image of the ibis,
though it is not really the same; and it runs in and out over the
parched fields, among the heads of the cattle.
There is peace in Cairo now among the Easterns and the Westerns, but
there never can be peace between the kites and crows. The feud is
carried on in the tops of the palm trees of the gardens. In one fierce
contest the bone of contention fell to the ground and I went to find
the cause of this eternal feud. It was no more and no less than a dead
rat. At the river side they have ample material for contention, and I
have seen as many as fifty great hawks or kites together hovering about
the masts of the boats.
The kites are seen at their best in a little desert city near. There
is not so much noise but that you can hear their musical whistle,
and watch their great stately quadrilles in the air, three or four
wheeling, poising, passing with swoops and curves against the blue.
A lovelier, more peaceful little bird haunts the palm gardens--the
cinnamon and ashen dove which seeks the woods of England in the summer.
Ten of them came home by our own boat one spring. They crept on behind
it on wearied wing till we pitied them, and hoped they would alight
and rest. Suddenly we all saw a sailing ship a mile or two away. With
one accord the doves turned and made towards it, but not liking it on
nearer view they turned again, caught us up without the least trouble,
and again limped along on the wing beside us. But we were comforted for
their fatigue.
In November the waters round Cairo had only just gone down, and the
fields near Gizeh were all mud. When evening fell there used to come a
wedge-shaped flock of pelicans from the desert. The great birds wheeled
round the top of Chufu’s pyramid, and went off to their fishing.
Each little village up the Nile has its own pigeon tower built
four-square, and bristling with sticks for the birds to perch. All the
village owns these towers, and round them the pretty flocks clap their
wings and take their brisk flights, merry and quick as Arab boys.
The long lines of herons in the water are more typical of the
meditative side of Oriental character. They stand out in long grey
lines, on long yellow spits of sands in the slow, great curves of the
river. But no bird can boast one half the resolute patience of the
Griffin Vulture. Round some long curves of the Nile I saw the great
grey birds stand; as we drew slowly nearer we could distinguish five,
of which two were standing opposite to one another with immense wings
spread, ready to fight. When we came opposite it was seen that they
were quarrelling about a dead sheep; as we drew away they were still
exchanging the _retort courteous, the quip modest, the reply churlish,
the reproof valiant and the countercheck quarrelsome;_ and we were out
of sight again before either gave _the lie direct_. Indeed, for all I
know, they may still be typifying the _Concert of Europe_.
The Egyptian vulture is much smaller and much more attractive than
this abhorred great bird. _Rachen_, white with black-edged wings, has
a beauty of his own as he circles luminously against the sky; there
is even a horrid grandeur about him as he springs into sight from the
blue, and beats steadily up the wind, allured by carrion scent among
the sandhills.
But of all the birds at Luxor the bee-eater is perhaps the loveliest
and the pied kingfisher the most lovable. This kingfisher is dappled
white and grey, he poises over water in the position of the dove in
stained-glass windows; his wings are lifted fluttering, his head bent
down. So he hovers intent and busy, careless of those who pass, till he
has perfectly found his aim. Then he drops as a stone falls, the waters
close above his head, and in a moment he emerges with a fish curving
silver from his bill. If “our loves remain” my spirit will sometimes
seek a little horseshoe lake with thick green water, above which sit
a parliament of lion-headed goddesses, and there it will watch this
kingfisher hover and poise and fall. At this place I once saw our own
kingfisher, but he is a travelled fellow and has lost the fearless,
busy confidence of the grey native; he does his fishing on the sly, and
went by like a blue flash to hide behind some carven stone. And I do
not know how soon the pied fisher will learn to follow his example. A
German, who thought himself a sportsman, also loved these kingfishers,
but, as Browning says, it was “another way of love.” He came home one
day with a bunch hanging from his hand. I do not know if he took them
home and stuffed them to look like nature; more probably he tired of
the little grey bodies and threw them away. They would not be so pretty
when the soul was gone.
And some men, Englishmen too, have been known to shoot the bee-eater.
This is a small light-green bird, as green as growing corn. From its
tail hang two long dark feathers; it has a long black beak, with a
stripe passing by the eye across paler cheeks. There are some kinds
more brilliantly coloured than this; the beauty of it is most manifest
when it is bee-eating. Then it spreads bronze wings, turns and flutters
like a butterfly, and as it turns a gold sheen ripples over the green.
These are sociable birds, and they sit by half-dozens on a branch of
carob, taking turns to flutter and catch.
Compared to this bird the crowned hoopoe himself seems almost gross.
He is at ease again, since Solomon took back his gift, and the crown
of feathers is raised and lowered with a jaunty, self-sufficient air.
Where the market road of Luxor ran out into the fields, close by the
hole dug by an Arab weaver in the middle of the way to set his loom
in, was a favourite place for the hoopoes, and here you might see two
or three together, as large as thrushes, with bodies coloured like the
russet jay, fine curving bills, and the gay crest. But if you wish to
love a hoopoe do not watch it when it eats a thick-bodied moth.
Over the plain of Thebes the swallow plays, glancing by; you hail him
as a fellow countryman, but foreign travel would seem to have altered
his customs and driven away his dear domestic habits. The old Egyptians
carved on stone two little birds like swallows, but one had a wing
curled upwards, and one had a straighter wing; and whereas the latter
symbolised greatness, the former portended evil. One would need all the
wisdom of Egypt to know what mystery lies behind the curling of the
wing.
Through the fields another merry bird comes into sight--the crested
lark, which is so bold that it will hardly move from the path your
donkey takes; or it sits among the corn blades as you go by, and
runs but a few steps as you canter past. The birds are tame, because
the Arabs do not kill them; Mohammed took a very narrow view of
the subject, and it is left to Englishmen and Germans to check the
excessive familiarity of birds and men, and to try to make nature more
normal.
If these rarer birds are tame, our own bold sparrows are a hundred
times more impudent. As the Arab waiters clear away the breakfast they
chase the sparrows out through the doors; if you sleep with shutters
open you may expect to find a sparrow or two sitting on your bed when
you wake; they pry into your cupboard if the doors are left open; they
pull a thread out of the mat near your feet to make a nest behind the
electric bell wires in the hall; and one determined pair set themselves
to build behind the books in our bookcase. We pulled the nest to pieces
many times, but they had us at last, and we found two eggs laid upon a
wisp of hay.
There is another bedroom visitor with better manners--namely, the
little grey owl who mews high up in the palm tree; he does not make
himself so common as the sparrow, but in my bedroom one evening he
appeared on the window-sill, bowed about a dozen times and went out
again.
The wagtails do not come indoors, but outside they will follow and
wait for crumbs; will stand with pulsing tail while one lunches at the
corner of some temple, running after the scraps of bread thrown to them
and waiting to clear the remnants of the feast. The grey wagtail is the
commoner, and the plump yellow wagtail is a rare shy visitor. On board
ship he catches something more of the spirit of comradeship.
What more can one tell of the cuckoo with spangled crest, whose
spangles can be stroked off and come back again; of the chat with rosy
breast, of the oriole of golden plumage. The air is still in this
country so that you may hear the voices of the past speak silently; and
the very song of the birds is hushed in the land of the rustling of
wings.