One of the first peculiarities of Bombay that I noticed and never lost
sight of was the kites. The city by day is never without these spies,
these sentries. From dawn to dusk the great unresting birds are sailing
over it, silent and vigilant. Whenever you look up, there they are,
criss-crossing in the sky, swooping and swerving and watching. After a
while one begins to be nervous: it is disquieting to be so continually
under inspection. Now and then they quarrel and even fight: now and then
one will descend with a rush and rise carrying a rat or other delicacy
in its claws; but these interruptions of the pattern are only momentary.
For the rest of the time they swirl and circle and never cease to watch.
Bombay also has its predatory crows, who are so bold that it is unsafe
to leave any bright article on the veranda table. Spectacles, for
example, set up a longing in their hearts which they make no effort
to control. But these birds are everywhere. At a wayside station just
outside Calcutta, in the early morning, the passengers all had tea, and
when it was finished and the trays were laid on the platform, I
watched the crows, who were perfectly aware of this custom and had been
approaching nearer and nearer as we drank, dart swiftly to the sugar
basins and carry off the lumps that remained. The crow, however, is,
comparatively speaking, a human being; the kite is something alien and a
cause of fear, and the traveller in India never loses him. His eye is as
coldly attentive to Calcutta as to Bombay.
It is, of course, the indigenous birds of a country that emphasise its
foreignness far more than its people. People can travel. Turbaned heads
are, for example, not unknown in England; but to have green parrots with
long tails flitting among the trees, as they used to flit in my host's
garden in Bombay, is to be in India beyond question. At Raisina we had
mynahs and the babblers, or "Seven Sisters," in great profusion, and
also the King Crow with his imposing tail; while the little striped
squirrels were everywhere. These merry restless little rodents do more
than run and scamper and leap: they seem to be positively lifted into
space by their tails. Their stripes (as every one knows) came directly
from the hand of God, recording for ever how, on the day of creation, He
stroked them by way of approval.
No Indian bird gave me so much pleasure to watch as the speckled
kingfishers, which I saw at their best on the Jumna at Okhla. They poise
in the air above the water with their long bills pointed downwards at a
right-angle to their fluttering bodies, searching the depths for their
prey; and then they drop with the quickness of thought into the stream.
The other kingfisher--coloured like ours but bigger--who waits on
an overhanging branch, I saw too, but the evolutions of the hovering
variety were more absorbing.
When one is travelling by road, the birds that most attract the notice
are the peacocks and the giant cranes; while wherever there are cattle
in any numbers there are the white paddy birds, feeding on their
backs--the birds from which the osprey plumes are obtained. One sees,
too, many kinds of eagle and hawk. In fact, the ornithologist can never
be dull in this country.
Wild animals I had few opportunities to observe, although a mongoose
at Raisina gave me a very amusing ten minutes. At Raisina, also, the
jackals came close to the house at night; and on an early morning ride
in a motorcar to Agra we passed a wolf, and a little later were most
impudently raced and outdistanced by a blackbuck, who, instead of
bolting into security at the sight or sound of man, ran, or rather,
advanced--for his progress is mysterious and magical--beside us for some
forty yards and then,--with a laugh, put on extra speed (we were doing
perhaps thirty miles an hour) and disappeared ahead. All about Muttra
we dispersed monkeys up the trees and into the bushes as we approached.
Next to the parrots it is the monkeys that most convince the traveller
that he is in a strange tropical land. And the flying foxes. Nothing
is more strange than a tree full of these creatures sleeping pendant by
day, or their silent swift black movements by night.
I saw no snakes wild, but in the Bacteriological Laboratory at Parel
in Bombay, which Lt.-Col. Glen Liston controls with so much zeal and
resourcefulness, I was shown the process by which the antidotes to snake
poisoning are prepared, for dispersion through the country. A cobra or
black snake is released from his cage and fixed by the attendant with
a stick pressed on his neck a little below the head. The snake is then
firmly and safely held just above this point between the finger and
thumb, and a tumbler, with a piece of flannel round its edge, is
proffered to it to bite. As the snake bites, a clear yellow fluid, like
strained honey in colour and thickness, flows into the glass from the
poison fangs. This poison is later injected in small doses into the
veins of horses kept carefully for the purpose, and then, in due course,
the blood of the horses is tapped in order to make the anti-toxin.
Wonderful are the ways of science! The Laboratory is also the
headquarters of the Government's constant campaign against malaria and
guinea worm, typhoid and cholera, and, in a smaller degree, hydrophobia.
But nothing, I should guess, would ever get sanitary sense into India,
except in almost negligible patches.