The Zoo Revisited/Chapter 2

WAS passing-by the Night Heron's pond when a gentle voice from the other side of the wirenetting-arrested my attention. At first I thought it was Mahomet's bird, the dove of Mecca, whom the Prophet blessed, and who, as “the good fairy of the mimosa,” flies to-day unharmed about the tents of the hungriest and poorest Arabs, a gentle bird of tranquil plumage and soothing note. It was sitting on a bough close to the wires and looking at me. But the voice that I had heard came again, from a stone hard by, and then I saw that it was the ibis of Egyptian worship.

“What ails you, sacred thing?” I asked.

“The top of this stone is round,” it said I “and I cannot build a nest on it. The sticks slip off and the grasses blow away, and I wish that I were dead.”

“But why not try a flat stone?” I ventured to ask. “Then the sticks will stay and the grasses will stop, and life will be worth your living.”

“But there is no mystery about building nests on flat-topped stones,” said the ibis; “and everybody says I am 'the bird of mystery.' I hear them say so as they pass.”

“Yes, gentle fowl, so you are, the Bird of Mystery, but the mystery has been dead these many centuries, and buried under the ruins of the shrines of Isis. And nowadays round-topped stones will not hold nests, not even yours, old worker of miracles in the long-ago days of Dendera.”

“Yet they call me the Sacred Ibis still.”

“True, my pied divinity. Yet you are not alone, even here in Regent's Park, in your change of fortunes. If you could only come with me to the Monkey House I would show you, looking-wofully among the straw for a nut that he has lost, the green monkey of Ethiopia, who was once a god in 'mad Egypt,' no less a one (whisper his name under your breath) than Thoth himself, revered in hoary Memphis as the life-giver, whose effigy dignified the obelisks of Luxor, and whose person was the central sanctity of a hundred. Yet to-day men call him “the green monkey of Ethiopia,” and he steals hats off the heads of passing children, and wrangles with common monkeys over crumbs of gingerbread.”

There is no reason,” said the pensive ibis, “why, if the realities are dead, we should not try to live up to our traditions. Thoth (speak not his name aloud) should not squabble with common long-tailed monkeys for gingerbread.”

“Or look at Pthah again. What divinity in Egypt could stand against him? Wise men nowadays call him 'the pigmy baboon,' but he was once the god of learning, and without him Hermopolis would have been desolate indeed. Was he not the holder of the scales on the judgment seat of the dead, more potent Ibis even than yourself, as the guardian of all the hundred gates of Thebes? Yet I saw him a few minutes ago making merry over a shred of a tattered parasol, the very picture of an idiot.”

“Because we have come down in the world there is no reason for us to forget our self-respect,” said the Fowl of Mystery sententiously.

“Certainly not. And look, who comes here, in a shabby tabby coat, and ears all disreputably frayed, hungrily eying the sparrows on the railings?”

“That is a cat,” said the ibis.

“Yes, and once the most sacred thing in all Bubastis. But the days are long gone by when to bury a spiced cat, processions of white-robed priests, crowned with acacias, went down, with the clashing of cymbals and the singing of the temple choirs, between long aisles of reverent folk, out through the city gates to the catacombs under the rocks. No body spices dead cats nowadays; few even bury them, except the parish.”

“You are speaking of things I do not understand. But I wish this stone were flat on the top.”

“Well, there is one over there that is as flat as it can be. Why not take that one?”

“Because it belongs to a scarlet ibis. And that reminds me. I wish you would explain to people that the scarlet ibis is not the Sacred ibis. Nearly everybody makes this mistake. They read my name on the label and then look about for me, and because I am black and white and the other is all red they think it must be the other. I don't mind them saying 'Isn't it beautiful'? but I do wish they wouldn't think it was me.”

“Never mind what those people say, they call the flamingoes pelicans. It was only an hour or so ago a man with his wife and weary family came up to this very enclosure and read off the names, 'mandarin ducks, Barbary turtle-doves, black-headed gulls' (those were the names that were up on the side of the enclosure where he was standing), and there they stood, the whole family, looking at ibises, flamingoes, spoon-bills, night-herons, and egrets, wondering which were the mandarin ducks and which were the Barbary turtle-doves. At last one child asked the question, and nobody replied, and after an interval of gloomy contemplation of the length of the flamingoes' legs, they passed on their way silent, uninformed, brain-weary with the long day's variety of reptile, beast, and bird. Had they met a whale on foot they would not have been excited. And all the man said was, 'they look to have a good time of it.' And so you have, you know.”

“Oh yes, we are comfortable enough, but don't you think we are rather mixed?”

“Well, you see, there isn't room in the gardens to give each of you an enclosure as large as this, and surely you are better off than the birds opposite, or even than the eagles, who cannot fly from the ground to the perch, and from the perch to the ground again. Here you can have a good flight. Besides, if your company is 'mixed,' you have some notable companions. There are the egrets.”

“Wretched creatures! They will not let any of us have peace, and as for the night herons, they addled all their eggs because the egrets would not let them sit quietly upon their nests. They are going to be sent away.”

“But they are illustrious birds, and among the aristocracy of fowls. Their head plumes are to this day the insignia of royalty. The flamingoes, again, what can be more courtly than they, or more magnificent when they spread their wings? Will you listen to a little poetry?”

The ibis, hurriedly, “They are prodigiously greedy about the shrimps, though, when they are hungry. Look at them now, refusing to let the spoonbill even see what is in the buckets. Sometimes I only get those that they drop in the water and are too lazy to fish out again, unless we actually go and pick them out of the flamingoes' beaks.”

“The spoonbills, again, they are distinctly of the peerage—Lord Spoonbill sounds as if it came straight out of Sir Bernard's Bible or Thackeray—and their manners are very”

Here the ibis burst out laughing, for just at that minute the two spoonbills, having both got hold of the same piece of meat, were dancing ridiculously on the tips of their toes, with their beaks touching, and their necks stretched out to the utmost. At last one let go to demonstrate, and the other at once swallowed the meat.

“Yes, their manners are veryas you said.”

“The night herons, again, they belong to a family that has been ennobled from the first, and you cannot call mandarins of ducks plebeians. Isn't that good company enough? And, if you don't mind my saying it, this enclosure of yours is one of the most popular in the Gardens for the very reason that the birds are, as you complain, so 'mixed.' Nor can I imagine anything being devised, within the same space, of greater beauty and interest. You may laugh at those gulls; but not all your sanctity, my ibis, nor yet the plumage of your scarlet cousins, nor the wonders of the flamingoes, attract more sympathy than do those two common birds. For they have young ones in their nest, and the possession of those small black-spotted puffballs does more to win the hearts of the human beings who come to look at you than everything else put together. The mother's furious defence of her young ones, the absurd impetuosity of her attacks, and the ferocious vigour of her language, delight all lookers-on. The father too comes in for his share of applause, though he only sits by on a stone and shouts bravo! leaving his wife to do the hard work—and how well she does it. You would think, looking at her, she had eyes for nothing about her. Yet she has drawn a mother's circle round those precious little babies of hers, and woe to the bird, great or small, innocent or guilty, that puts a fraction of a toe within that magic ring; the mother swoops straight at the offender with such fierce anger in her voice, that he has to go at once, and without standing on the order of his going.

“The doves too are all nested, and filling the upper air with their cooing; they give to the whole enclosure a happy home-life look and sound that is very attractive, and brings into a more familiar and domestic harmony all the strange exotic birds that are grouped about the pools, and that in themselves conjure up only vague visions of African rivers and Asiatic solitudes. The combination is singularly fine, and I cannot remember in any public gardens in any part of the world so complete, so beautiful a scene as this night heron's pond of yours. To sit here in the shade and shelter of this canopy of cleverly-trained ash trees, and look on to the enclosure where you live, is, I think, one of the most exquisite glimpses of wild life in the world, and not to be surpassed even in Nature. The upper air is filled with the purring and murmuring of many kinds of doves that are perpetually floating or darting across the wide expanse. In the middle height, sentinels upon their nests, or drowsy upon the boughs, sit the herons, and the egrets and, lower, upon the stones and tree stumps, and on the ground, wading in the ponds, bathing, feeding, love-making, quarrelling, move about, perpetually restless, the strange and beautiful birds that keep you company. You, ibis, are for many visitors, the chief attraction, and the interest that gathers round you is unique; but, believe me, there is a great charm added, for the majority, by the familiar clamour of the seagulls and the cooing of the common ringdoves. Human nature is so simple a thing that if a sparrow is in the lion's cage everybody watches the sparrow.”

“Then I shall build a nest too, but, believe me, it goes against the grain to lay the sticks upon a flat stone, as all the other birds do. If you don't mind, I will try a little longer to see if I can manage it upon the round-topped one.”

“Do, and may Isis help you to a miracle.”