Part 11

Yes; but even the wing does not make the bird.

Place yourself towards the centre of the museum, and close to the clock. There you perceive, on your left, the first rudiment of the wing in the penguin of the southern pole, and its brother, the Arctic auk, one degree more developed; scaly winglets, whose glittering feathers rather recall the fish than the bird. On land the creature is feeble; but while earth is difficult for it, air is impossible. Do not complain too warmly. Its prescient mother destines it for the Polar Seas, where it will only need to paddle. She clothes it carefully in a fine coat of fat and an impenetrable covering. She will have it warm among the icebergs. Which is the better means? It seems as if she had hesitated, had wavered. By the side of the booby we see with surprise an essay at quite another genus, yet one not less remarkable as a maternal precaution. I refer to a very rare gorfou--which I have seen in no other museum--attired in the rough skin of a quadruped, resembling a goat's fleece, but more shining, perhaps, in the living animal, and certainly impermeable to water.

To link together the birds which do not fly, we must find the connecting point in the navigator of the desert--the bird-camel, the ostrich, resembling the camel itself in its internal structure. At least, if its imperfect wings cannot raise it above the earth, they assist it powerfully in walking, and endow it with extraordinary swiftness: it is the sail with which it skims its arid African ocean.

Let us return to the penguin, the true starting-point of the series--to the penguin, whose rudimentary pinion cannot be employed as a sail, does not aid it in walking, is only an indication, like a memorial of nature.

She loosens her bonds, she rises with difficulty in a first attempt at flight by means of two strange figures, which appear to us both grotesque and pretentious. The penguin is not of these; a simple, silly creature, you see that it never had the ambition to fly. But here are they who emancipate themselves, who seem in quest of the adornment or the grace of motion. The gorfou may be taken for a penguin which has decided to quit its condition. It assumes a coquettish tuft of plumes, that throws into high relief its ugliness. The shapeless puffin, which seems the very caricature of a caricature, the paroquet, resembles it in its great beak, rudely chipped, but without edge or strength. Tail-less and ill-balanced, it may always be upset by the weight of its large head. It ventures, nevertheless, to flutter about, at the hazard of toppling over. It swoops nobly close to the surface of earth, and is, perhaps, the envy of the penguins and the seals. Sometimes it even risks itself at sea--ill-fated ship, which the lightest breeze will wreck!

It is, however, impossible to deny that the first flight is taken. Birds of various kinds carry on the enterprise more successfully. The rich genus of divers (Brachypteræ), in its species widely different, connects the sailor-birds with the natatores, or swimmers: those, with wings perfected, with a bold and secure flight, accomplish the longest voyages; these, still clothed with the glittering feathers of the penguin, frisk and sport at the bottom of the seas. They want but fins and respiratory organs to become actual fishes. They are alternately masters of both elements, air and water.

TRIUMPH OF THE WING.

THE FRIGATE BIRD.

Let us not attempt to particularize all the intermediate gradations. Let us proceed to yonder snow-white bird, which I perceive floating on high among the clouds; the bird which one sees everywhere--on the water, on land, on rocks alternately concealed and exposed by the waves; the bird which one loves to watch, familiar as it is, and greedy, and which might well be named "the little vulture of the seas." I speak of those myriads of petrels, or gulls, with whose hoarse cries every waste resounds. Find me, if you can, creatures endowed with fuller liberty. Day and night, south or north, sea or shore, dead prey or living, all is one to them. Using everything, at home everywhere, they indifferently display their white sails from the waves to the heaven; the fresh breeze, ever shifting and changing, is the bounteous wind which always blows in the direction they most desire.

What are they but air, sea, the elements, which have taken wing and fly? I know nothing of it. To see their gray eye, stern and cold (never successfully imitated in our museums), is to see the gray, indifferent sea of the north in all its icy impassiveness. What do I say? That sea exhibits more emotion. At times phosphorescent and electrical, it will rise into strong animation. Old Father Ocean, saturnine and passionate, often revolves, under his pale countenance, a host of thoughts. His sons, the goëlands, have less of animal life than he has. They fly, with their dead eyes seeking some dead prey; and in congregated flocks they expedite the destruction of the great carcasses which float upon the sea for their behoof. Not ferocious in aspect, amusing the voyager by their sports, by frequent glimpses of their snowy pinions, they speak to him of remote lands, of the shores which he leaves behind or is about to visit, of absent or hoped-for friends. And they are useful to him, also, by announcing and predicting the coming storm. Ofttimes their sail expanded warns him to furl his own.

For do not suppose that when the tempest breaks they deign to fold their wings. Far from this: it is then that they set forth. The storm is their harvest time; the more terrible the sea, so much the less easily can the fish escape from these daring fishers. In the Bay of Biscay, where the ocean-swell, driven from the north-west, after traversing the Atlantic, arrives in mighty billows, swollen to enormous heights, with a terrific clash and shock, the tranquil petrels labour imperturbably. "I saw them," says M. de Quatrefages, "describe in the air a thousand curves, plunge between two waves, reappear with a fish. Swiftest when they followed the wind, slowest when they confronted it, they nevertheless poised always with the same ease, and never appeared to give a stroke of the wing the more than in the calmest weather. And yet the billows mounted up the slopes, like cataracts reversed, as high as the platform of Nôtre Dame, and their spray higher than Montmartre. They did not appear more moved by it."

Man has not their philosophy. The seaman is powerfully affected when, at the decline of day, a sudden night darkening over the sea, he descries, hovering about his barque, an ominous little pigeon, a bird of funereal black. Black is not the fitting word; black would be less gloomy: the true tint is that of a smoky-brown, which cannot be defined. It is a shadow of hell, an evil vision, which strides along the waters, breasts the billows, crushes under its feet the tempest. The stormy petrel (or "St. Peter") is the horror of the seaman, who sees in it, according to his belief, a living curse. Whence does it come? How is it able to rise at such enormous distances from all land? What wills it? What does it come in quest of, if not of a wreck? It sweeps to and fro impatiently, and already selects the corpses which its accomplice, the atrocious and iniquitous sea, will soon deliver up to its mercies.

Such are the fables of fear. Less panic-stricken minds would see in the poor bird another ship in distress, an imprudent navigator, which has also been surprised far from shore and without an asylum. Our vessel is for him an island, where he would fain repose. The track of the barque, which rides through both wind and wave, is in itself a refuge, a succour against fatigue. Incessantly, with nimble flight, he places the rampart of the vessel between himself and the tempest. Timid and short-sighted, you see it only when it brings the night. Like ourselves, it dreads the storm--it trembles with fear--it would fain escape--and like you, O seaman, it sighs, "What will become of my little ones?"

But the black hour passes, day reappears, and I see a small blue point in the heaven. Happy and serene region, which has rested in peace far above the hurricane! In that blue point, and at an elevation of ten thousand feet, royally floats a little bird with enormous pens. A gull? No; its wings are black. An eagle? No; the bird is too small.

It is the little ocean-eagle, first and chief of the winged race, the daring navigator who never furls his sails, the lord of the tempest, the scorner of all peril--the man-of-war or frigate-bird.

We have reached the culminating point of the series commenced by the wingless bird. Here we have a bird which is virtually nothing more than wings: scarcely any body--barely as large as that of the domestic cock--while his prodigious pinions are fifteen feet in span. The great problem of flight is solved and overpassed, for the power of flight seems useless. Such a bird, naturally sustained by such supports, need but allow himself to be borne along. The storm bursts; he mounts to lofty heights, where he finds tranquillity. The poetic metaphor, untrue when applied to any other bird, is no exaggeration when applied to him: literally, he sleeps upon the storm.

When he chooses to oar his way seriously, all distance vanishes: he breakfasts at the Senegal; he dines in America.

Or, if he thinks fit to take more time, and amuse himself en route, he can do so. He may continue his progress through the night indefinitely, certain of reposing himself. Upon what? On his huge motionless wing, which takes upon itself all the weariness of the voyage; or on the wind, his slave, which eagerly hastens to cradle him.

Observe, moreover, that this strange being is gifted with the proud prerogative of fearing nothing in this world. Little, but strong and intrepid, he braves all the tyrants of the air. He can despise, if need be, the pygargue and the condor: those huge unwieldy creatures will with great difficulty have put themselves in motion when he shall have already achieved a distance of ten leagues.

Oh, it is then that envy seizes us, when, amid the glowing azure of the Tropics, at incredible altitudes, almost imperceptible in the dim remoteness, we see him triumphantly sweeping past us--this black, solitary bird, alone in the waste of heaven: or, at the most, at a lower elevation, the snow-white sea-swallow crosses his flights in easy grace!

Why dost not thou take me upon thy pens, O king of the air, thou fearless and unwearied master of space, whose wondrously swift flight annihilates time? Who more than thou is raised above the mean fatalities of existence?

One thing, however, has astonished me: that, when contemplated from near at hand, the first of the winged kingdom should have nothing of that serenity which a free life promises. His eye is cruelly hard, severe, mobile, unquiet. His vexed attitude is that of some unhappy sentinel doomed, under pain of death, to keep watch over the infinity of ocean. He visibly exerts himself to see afar. And if his vision does not avail him, the doom is on his dark countenance; nature condemns him, he dies.

On looking at him closely, you perceive that he has no feet. Or at all events, feet which being palmate and exceedingly short, can neither walk nor perch. With a formidable beak, he has not the talons of a true eagle of the sea. A pseudo-eagle, and superior to the true in his daring as in his powers of flight, he has not, however, his strength, his invincible grasp. He strikes and slays: can he seize?

Thence arises his life of uncertainty and hazard--the life of a corsair and a pirate rather than of a mariner--and the fixed inquiry ever legible on his countenance: "Shall I feed? Shall I have wherewithal to nourish my little ones this evening?"

The immense and superb apparatus of his wings becomes on land a danger and an embarrassment. To raise himself he needs a strong wind and a lofty station, a promontory, a rock. Surprised on a sandy level, on the banks, the low reefs where he sometimes halts, the frigate-bird is defenceless; in vain he threatens, he strikes, for a blow from a stick will overcome him.

At sea, those vast wings, of such admirable utility in ascent, are ill-fitted for skimming the surface of the water. When wetted, they may over-weight and sink him. And thereupon, woe to the bird! He belongs to the fishes, he nourishes the mean tribes on which he had relied for his own behoof; the game eats the hunter, the ensnarer is ensnared.

And yet, what shall he do? His food lies in the waters. He is ever compelled to draw near them, to return to them, to skim incessantly the hateful and prolific sea which threatens to engulf him.

Thus, then, this being so well-armed, winged, superior to all others in power of flight and vision as in daring, leads but a trembling and precarious life. He would die of hunger had he not the industry to create for himself a purveyor, whom he cheats of his food. His ignoble resource, alas, is to attack a dull and timorous bird, the noddy, famous as a fisher. The frigate-bird, which is of no larger dimensions, pursues him, strikes him on the neck with his beak, and constrains him to yield up his prey. All these incidents transpire in the air; before the fish can fall, he catches it on its passage.