on the ground, discovered behind it the dangerous black serpent,
the most venomous of his tribe. He was about to cut it in two when
a merciful Hindu interposed, obtained its pardon, and took up the
serpent. Stung by it, he died immediately.
Such are the terrors of nature in those formidable climates. But
reptiles, now-a-days rare, are not the greatest curse. In all places
and at all times it is now the insect. Insects everywhere, and in
everything; they possess an infinity of means for attacking you; they
walk, swim, glide, fly; they are in the air, and you breathe them.
Invisible, they make known their presence by the most painful wounds.
Recently, in one of our sea-ports, an official of the customs opened
a parcel of papers brought from the colonies a long time previously.
A fly furiously darted out of it; it pursued, it stung him; two days
afterwards he was a corpse.
The hardiest of men, the buccaneers and filibusters, declared that of
all dangers and of all pains they dreaded most the wounds of insects.
Frequently intangible, invisible, irresistible, they are destruction
itself under an unavoidable form. How shall you oppose them when they
make war upon you in legions? Once, at Barbadoes, the inhabitants
observed an immense army of great ants, which, impelled by unknown
causes, advanced in a serried column and in the same direction against
the houses. To kill them was only trouble lost. There were no means
of arresting their progress. At last an ingenious mind fortunately
suggested that trains of gunpowder should be laid across their route,
and set on fire. These volcanoes terrified them, and the torrent of
invasion gradually turned aside.
No mediæval armoury, with all the strange weapons then made use of;
no chirurgical implement factory, with the thousands of dreadful
instruments invented by modern art, can be compared with the monstrous
armour of Tropical insects--their pincers, their nippers, their teeth,
their saws, their horns, their augers, all their tools of combat, of
death, and of dissection, with which they come armed to the battle,
with which they labour, pierce, cut, rend, and finely partition, with
skill and dexterity equal to their furious blood-thirstiness.
Our grandest works may not defy the energetic force of these terrible
legions. Give them a ship of the line--what do I say? a town--to
devour, and they charge at it with eager joy. In course of time
they have excavated under Valentia, near Caraccas, vast abysses and
catacombs; the city is now literally suspended. A few individuals of
this voracious tribe, unfortunately transported to Rochelle, have set
to work to eat up the place, and already more than one edifice trembles
upon timbers which are only externally sound, and at the core are
rotten.
What would be the fate of a man given up to the insects? One dares
not think of it. An unfortunate wretch, while intoxicated, fell down
near a carcass. The insects which were devouring the dead could
not distinguish from it the living; they took possession of his
body, entered at every avenue, filled all the natural cavities. It
was impossible to save him. He expired in the midst of frightful
convulsions.
In those lands of fire, where the rapidity of decomposition renders
every corpse dangerous, where all death threatens life, these terrible
accelerators of the disappearance of animal bodies multiply _ad
infinitum_. A corpse scarcely touches the earth before it is seized,
attacked, disorganized, dissected. Only the bones are left. Nature,
endangered by her own fecundity, invites, stimulates, encourages
them by the heat, by the irritation of a world of spices and acrid
substances. She makes them furious hunters, insatiable gluttons.
The tiger and the lion, compared with the vulture, are mild, sober,
moderate creatures; but what is the vulture in the presence of an
insect which, in four-and-twenty hours, consumes thrice its own weight?
Greece personified nature under the calm and noble image of Cybele
chariot-drawn by lions. India dreams of her god Siva, the divinity of
life and death, who incessantly winks his eye, never gazing fixedly,
because his single glance would reduce all the worlds to dust. How weak
these fancies of men in the presence of the reality! What avail their
fictions before the burning centre where, by atoms or by seconds, life
dies, is born, blazes, scintillates? Who could sustain the thunderous
flash without reeling and without terror?
[Illustration]
Just, indeed, and legitimate, is the traveller's hesitancy at the
entrance of these fearful forests where Tropical Nature, under forms
oftentimes of great beauty, wages her keenest strife. It is the place
to pause when one knows that the most formidable defence of the Spanish
fortresses is found in a simple grove of cactus, which, planted around
them, speedily swarms with serpents. You frequently detect there a
strong odour of musk, a nauseous, a sinister odour. It tells you that
you are treading on the very dust of the dead: the wreck of animals
which possessed that peculiar savour, tiger-cats, and crocodiles,
vultures, vipers, and rattle-snakes.
The peril is greatest, perhaps, in those virgin-forests where
everything is eloquent of life, where nature's seething crucible
eternally boils and bubbles.
Here and there their living shadows thicken with a threefold
canopy--the colossal trees, the entwining and interlacing lianas, and
herbs of thirty feet high with magnificent leaves. At intervals, these
herbs sink into the ancient primeval slime; while, at the height of a
hundred feet, the lofty and puissant flowers break through the deep
night to display themselves in the burning sun.
In the clearances--the narrow alleys where his rays penetrate--there
is a scintillation, an eternal murmuring, of beetles, butterflies,
humming-birds, and fly-catchers--gems animated and mobile, which
incessantly flutter to and fro. At night--a far more astonishing
scene!--begins the fairylike illumination of shining fire-flies, which,
by thousands of millions, weave the most fantastic arabesques, dazzling
fantasias of light, magical scrolls of fire.
With all this splendour there lurks in the lower levels an obscure
race, a hideous and foul world of caymans, of water-serpents. To the
trunks of enormous trees the fanciful orchids, the well-loved daughters
of fever, the children of a miasmatic atmosphere, quaint vegetable
butterflies, suspend themselves in seeming flight. In these murderous
solitudes they take their delight, and bathe in the putrid swamps,
drink of the death which inspires them with vitality, and, by the
caprice of their unheard-of colours, make sport of the intoxication of
nature.
Do not yield--defend yourself--let not the fatal charm bow down your
sinking head. Awake! arouse! under a hundred forms the danger surrounds
you. Yellow fever lurks beneath these flowers, and the black _vomito_;
reptiles trail at your feet. If you gave way to fatigue, a noiseless
army of implacable anatomists would take possession of you, and with
a million lancets convert all your tissues into an admirable bit of
lacework, a gauze veil, a breath, nothingness.
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.
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration]
To him, indeed, inhabited regions owe all their security. In the
furthest Africa, at the Cape, the good serpent-eater defends man
against the reptiles. Peaceable in disposition and gentle in aspect,
he seems to engage without passion in his dangerous encounters. The
gigantic _jabiru_ does not labour less in the deserts of Guiana, where
man as yet ventures not to live. Their perilous savannahs, alternately
inundated and parched, a dubious ocean teeming in the sunshine with
a horrible population of monsters as yet unknown, possess, as their
superior inhabitant, their intrepid scavenger, a noble bird of battle,
retaining some relics of the ancient weapons with which the primeval
birds were very probably provided in their struggle against the dragon.
These are a horn on the head, and a spur on each of the wings. With
the first it stirs up, excites, and rouses out of the mud its enemy.
The others serve as a guard and defence: the reptile which hugs and
folds it in its embrace, at the same time plunges into its own body
these keen darts, and by its constriction, its own actual exertions, is
poniarded.
[Illustration]
This brave and beautiful bird, last-born of the ancient worlds and a
surviving witness to forgotten encounters, which is born, lives, and
dies in the slime, in the primitive cloaca, has no stain nevertheless
of his unclean cradle. I know not what moral instinct raises and
supports him above it. His grand and formidable voice, which sways the
desert, announces from afar the gravity and dignified heroism of the
noble and haughty purifier. The kamichi (_Palamedéa cornuta_), as he is
called, is rare; he forms a genus of himself, a species which is not
divided.
Despising the ignoble promiscuousness of the low world in which he
lives, he lives alone, with but one mate. Undoubtedly, in his career
of war, his mate is also a companion-in-arms. They love, they fight
together; they follow the same destiny. Theirs is that soldierly
marriage of which Tacitus speaks: "_Sic vivendum, sic pereundum_,"--"To
life, to death." When this tender companionship, this consoling
succour, fails the kamichi, he disdains to protract his existence; he
rejoins the loved one which he cannot survive.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: PURIFICATION.]
[Illustration]
PURIFICATION.
In the morning--not at the first blush of dawn, but when the sun
already mounts the horizon--and at the very moment when the cocoa-nut
tree unfolds its leaves, the _urubus_ (or little vultures), perched in
knots of forty or fifty upon its branches, open their brilliant ruby
eyes. The toils of the day demand them. In indolent Africa a hundred
villages invoke them; in drowsy America, south of Panama or Caraccas,
they, swiftest of cleansers, must sweep out and purify the town before
the Spaniard rises, before the potent sun has stirred the carcass and
the mass of rottenness into fermentation. If they failed a single day,
the country would become a desert.
When it is evening-time in America--when the urubu, his day's work
ended, replaces himself on the cocoa-nut tree--the minarets of Asia
sparkle in the morning's rays. Not less punctual than their American
brothers, vultures, crows, storks, ibises, set out from their balconies
on their various missions: some to the fields, to destroy the insect
and the serpent; others, alighting in the streets of Alexandria or
Cairo, hasten to accomplish their task of municipal scavengering. Did
they but take the briefest holiday the plague would soon be the only
inhabitant of the country.
Thus, in the two hemispheres, the great work of public health is
performed with solemn and wonderful regularity. If the sun is punctual
in fertilizing life, these scavengers--sworn in and licensed by
nature--are no less punctual in withdrawing from his rays the shocking
spectacle of death.
[Illustration]
Seemingly they are not ignorant of the importance of their functions.
Approach them, and they will not retreat. When they have received the
signal from their comrades the crows, which often precede them and
point out their prey, you will see the vultures descend in a cloud
from one knows not whence, as if from heaven! Naturally solitary, and
without communication--mostly silent--they flock to the banquet by the
hundred, and nothing disturbs them. They quarrel not among themselves,
they take no heed of the passer-by. They imperturbably accomplish their
functions in a stern kind of gravity; with decency and propriety; the
corpse disappears, the skin remains. In a moment a frightful mass
of putrid fermentation, which man had never dared to draw near, has
vanished--has re-entered the pure and wholesome current of universal
life.
It is strange that the more useful they are to us, the more odious
we find them. We are unwilling to accept them for what they are,
to regard them in their true _rôle_, as the beneficent cressets of
living fire through which nature passes everything that might corrupt
the higher life. For this purpose she has provided them with an
admirable apparatus, which receives, destroys, transforms, without
ever rejecting, wearying, or even satisfying itself. Let them devour a
hippopotamus, and they are still famished. To the gulls (those vultures
of the sea) a whale seems but a reasonable morsel! They will dissect
it and clear it away better than the most skilful whalers. As long as
aught of it remains they remain; fire at them, and they intrepidly
return to it in the mouth of your guns. Nothing dislodges the vulture
on the carcass of a hippopotamus. Levaillant killed one of these birds,
which, though mortally wounded, still plucked away scraps of flesh. Was
he starving? Not he; food was found in his stomach weighing six pounds!
This is automatic gluttony, rather than ferocity. If their aspect is
sad and sombre, nature has favoured them for the most part with a
delicate and feminine ornament, the soft white down about their neck.
Standing before them, you feel yourself in the presence of the
ministers of death; but of death tranquil and natural, and not of
murder. Like the elements, they are serious, grave, inaccusable, at
bottom innocent--rather, let us say, deserving. Though gifted with
a vital force which resumes, subdues, absorbs everything, they are
subject, more than any other beings, to general influences; are
swayed by the conditions of atmosphere and temperature; essentially
hygrometrical, they are living barometers. The morning's humidity
burdens their heavy wings; the weakest prey at that hour might pass
with impunity before them. So great is their subjection to external
nature, that the American species, perched in uniform ranks on the
cocoa-nut branches, follow, as we have said, the exact hour when the
leaves fold up, retire to rest long before evening, and only awake when
the sun, already high above the horizon, re-opens the leaves of the
tree and their white, heavy eyelids.
These admirable agents of that beneficent chemistry which preserves and
balances life here below, labour for us in a thousand places where we
ourselves may never penetrate. We clearly discern their presence and
their services in our towns; but no one can measure the full extent
of their benefits in those deserts where every breath of the winds is
death. In the fathomless forest, in the deep morasses, under the impure
shadow of mangoes and mangroves, where ferment the corpses of two
worlds, dashed to and fro by the sea, the great purifying army seconds
and shortens the action both of the waves and the insects. Woe to the
inhabited world, if their mysterious and unknown toil ceased but for an
instant!
In America these public benefactors are protected by the law.
Egypt does more for them; she reveres, she loves them. If the
ancient worship no longer exists, they receive from men as kindly an
hospitality as in the time of Pharaoh. Ask an Egyptian fellah why
he allows himself to be infested and deafened by birds? why he so
patiently endures the insolence of the crow posted on his buffalo's
horn or his camel's hump, or gathering on the date-palms in flocks and
beating down the fruit?--he will answer nothing. To the bird everything
is lawful. Older than the Pyramids, he is the ancient inhabitant of the
country. Man is there only through his instrumentality; he could not
exist without the persistent toil of the ibis, the stork, the crow, and
the vulture.
Hence arises an universal sympathy for the animal, an instinctive
tenderness for all life, which, more than anything else, makes the
charm of the East. The West has its peculiar splendours--in sun and
climate America is not less dazzling; but the moral attraction of
Asia lies in the sentiment of unity which you feel in a world where
man is not divorced from nature; where the primitive alliance remains
unbroken; where the animals are ignorant that they have cause to dread
the human species. Laugh at it if you will; but there is a gentle
pleasure in observing this confidence--in seeing the birds come at the
Brahmin's call to eat from his very hand--in watching the apes on the
pagoda-roofs sleeping in domestic peace, playing with or suckling their
little ones in as much security as in the bosom of their native forests.
[Illustration]
"At Cairo," remarks a traveller, "the turtle-doves know so well they
are under the protection of the public, that they live in the midst
of the very clamour of the city. Every day I see them cooing on my
window-shutters, in a very narrow street, at the entrance of a noisy
bazaar, and at the busiest moment of the year, a little before the
Ramadan, when the ceremonies of marriage fill the city day and night
with uproar and tumult. The level roofs of the houses, the usual
promenade of the prisoners of the harem and their slaves, are in like
manner haunted by a crowd of birds. The eagles sleep in confidence on
the balconies of the minarets."
Conquerors have never failed to turn into derision this gentleness,
this tenderness for animated nature. The Persians, the Romans in Egypt,
our Europeans in India, the French in Algeria, have often outraged and
stricken these innocent brothers of man, the object of his ancient
reverence. A Cambyses slew the sacred cow; a Roman the ibis or cat
which destroyed unclean reptiles. But what means the cow? The fecundity
of the country. And the ibis? Its salubrity. Destroy these animals,
and the country is no longer habitable. That which has saved India and
Egypt through so many misfortunes, and preserved their fertility, is
neither the Nile nor the Ganges; it is respect for animal life, the
mildness and the gentle heart of man.
Profound in meaning was the speech of the priest of Saïs to the Greek
Herodotus: "You shall be children ever."
We shall always be so--we, men of the West--subtle and graceful
reasoners, so long as we shall not have comprehended, with a simple and
more exhaustive view, the reason of things. To be a child is to seize
life only by partial glimpses. To be a man is to be fully conscious of
all its harmonious unity. The child disports himself, shatters, and
spurns; he finds his happiness in undoing. And science in its childhood
does the same; it cannot study unless it kills; the sole use which it
makes of a living miracle is, in the first place, to dissect it. None
of us carry into our scientific pursuits that tender reverence for life
which nature rewards by unveiling to us her mysteries.
Enter the catacombs, where, to employ our haughty language, the rude
monuments sleep of a barbarous superstition; visit the treasure-stores
of India and Egypt; at each step you meet with naïve but not the less
profound intuitions of the essential mystery of life and death. Do
not let the form deceive you; do not look upon this as an artificial
work, fabricated by a priestly hand. Under the strange complexity
and burdensome tyranny of the sacerdotal form, I see two sentiments
everywhere revealing themselves in a human and pathetic manner:--
_The effort to save the loved soul_ from the shipwreck of death;
_The tender brotherhood of man and nature_, the religious sympathy for
the dumb animal as the divine instrument in the protection of human
life.
The instinct of antiquity perceived what observation and science
declare: that the Bird is the agent of the grand universal transition,
and of purification--the wholesome accelerator of the interchange of
substances. Especially in burning countries, where every delay is a
peril, he is, as Egypt said, the barque of safety which receives the
dead spoil, and causes it to re-enter the domain of life and the world
of purity.