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 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. 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 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 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 "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 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. 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. The fond and grateful Egyptian soul has recognized these benefits, and wishes for no happiness which it cannot share with the animals, its benefactors. It does not desire to be saved alone. It endeavours to associate them in its immortality. It wills that the sacred bird accompany it to the sombre realm, as if to bear it on its wings. |