I Paid Other Visits To The Spot At The Same Hour, And Sat Long
And Watched The Crows While They Watched Me, Occasionally
Tossing Pebbles On To Them To Make Them Shift Their Positions,
But The Magical Effect Was Not Produced Again.
As to the cause of that extraordinary colour in the crow's
eyes, one might say that it was merely the reflected red light
of the level sun.
We are familiar with the effect when
polished and wet surfaces, such as glass, stone, and water,
shine crimson in the light of a setting sun; but there is also
the fact, which is not well known, that the eye may show its
own hidden red - the crimson colour which is at the back of the
retina and which is commonly supposed to be seen only with the
ophthalmoscope. Nevertheless I find on inquiry among friends
and acquaintances that there are instances of persons in which
the iris when directly in front of the observer with the light
behind him, always looks crimson, and in several of these
cases. the persons exhibiting this colour, or danger signal,
as it may be called, were subject to brain trouble. It is
curious to find that the crimson colour or light has also been
observed in dogs: one friend has told me of a pet King
Charles, a lively good-tempered little dog with brown eyes
like any other dog, which yet when they looked up, into yours
in a room always shone ruby-red instead of hyaline blue, or
green, as is usually the case. From other friends I heard of
many other cases: one was of a child, an infant in arms, whose
eyes sometimes appeared crimson, another of a cat with yellow
eyes which shone crimson-red in certain lights. Of human
adults, I heard of two men great in the world of science, both
dead now, in whose eyes the red light had been seen just
before and during attacks of nervous breakdown. I heard also
of four other persons, not distinguished in any way, two of
them sisters, who showed the red light in the eyes: all of
them suffered, from brain trouble and two of them ended their
lives in asylums for the insane.
Discussing these cases with my informants, we came to the
conclusion that the red light in the human eye is probably
always a pathological condition, a danger signal; but it is
not perhaps safe to generalize on these few instances, and I
must add that all the medical men I have spoken to on the
subject shake their heads. One great man, an eye specialist,
went so far as to say that it is impossible, that the red
light in the eye was not seen by my informants but only
imagined. The ophthalmoscope, he said, will show you the
crimson at the back of the eye, but the colour is not and
cannot be reflected on the surface of the iris.
Chapter Sixteen: In Praise of the Cow
In spite of discontents I might have remained to this day by
the Otter, in the daily and hourly expectation of seeing some
new and wonderful thing in Nature in that place where a
crimson-eyed carrion-crow had been revealed to me, had not a
storm of thunder and rain broken over the country to shake me
out of a growing disinclination to move.
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