Wherefore the Lord banished it to an inaccessible Island in the
Encircling Ocean.
The Simurgh or 'Angka, dwelling behind veils of Light and Darkness on the
inaccessible summits of Caucasus, is in Persian mysticism an emblem of the
Almighty.
In Northern Siberia the people have a firm belief in the former existence
of birds of colossal size, suggested apparently by the fossil bones of
great pachyderms which are so abundant there. And the compressed
sabre-like horns of Rhinoceros tichorinus are constantly called, even by
Russian merchants, birds' claws. Some of the native tribes fancy the
vaulted skull of the same rhinoceros to be the bird's head, and the
leg-bones of other pachyderms to be its quills; and they relate that their
forefathers used to fight wonderful battles with this bird. Erman
ingeniously suggests that the Herodotean story of the Gryphons, from under
which the Arimaspians drew their gold, grew out of the legends about these
fossils.
I may add that the name of our rook in chess is taken from that of this
same bird; though first perverted from (Sansk.) rath, a chariot.
Some Eastern authors make the Rukh an enormous beast instead of a bird.
(See J.R.A.S. XIII. 64, and Elliot, II.
