The Bird's Brain Was Not Mechanical, And Therefore
He Was Not Wholly Mastered By Experience.
It was a purely human
action - just what we do ourselves.
Next he came across to the door to see
if a stray berry still remained on a creeper. He saw me at the window,
and he came to the window - right to it - and stopped and looked full at me
some minutes, within touch almost, saying as plainly as could be said, 'I
am starving - help me.' I never before knew a thrush make so unmistakable
an appeal for assistance, or deliberately approach so near (unless
previously encouraged). We tried to feed him, but we fear little of the
food reached him. The wonder of the incident was that a thrush should
still be left - there had not been one in the garden for two months.
Berries all gone, ground hard and foodless, streams frozen, snow lying
for weeks, frost stealing away the vital heat - ingenuity could not devise
a more terrible scene of torture to the birds. Neither for the thrushes
nor for the new-born infants in the tent did the onslaught of the winter
slacken. No pity in earth or heaven. This one thrush did, indeed, by some
exceptional fortune, survive; but where were the family of thrushes that
had sung so sweetly in the rainy autumn? Where were the blackbirds?
Looking down from the stilts of seven hundred feet into the deep coombe
of black oaks standing in the white snow, day by day, built round about
with the rugged mound of the hills, doubly locked with the key of
frost - it seemed to me to take on itself the actuality of the ancient
faith of the Magi. How the seeds of all living things - the germs - of bird
and animal, man and insect, tree and herb, of the whole earth - were
gathered together into a four-square rampart, and there laid to sleep in
safety, shielded by a spell-bound fortification against the coming flood,
not of water, but of frost and snow! With snow and frost and winter the
earth was overcome, and the world perished, stricken dumb and dead, swept
clean and utterly destroyed - a winter of the gods, the silence of snow
and universal death. All that had been passed away, and the earth was
depopulated. Death triumphed. But under the snow, behind the charmed
rampart, slept the living germs. Down in the deep coombe, where the dark
oaks stood out individually in the whiteness of the snow, fortified round
about with immovable hills, there was the actual presentment of
Zoroaster's sacred story. Locked in sleep lay bud and germ - the
butterflies of next summer were there somewhere, under the snow. The
earth was swept of its inhabitants, but the seeds of life were not dead.
Near by were the tents of the gipsies - an Eastern race, whose forefathers
perhaps had seen that very Magian worship of the Light; and in those
tents birth had already taken place. Under the Night of winter - under the
power of dark Ahriman, the evil spirit of Destruction - lay bud and germ
in bondage, waiting for the coming of Ormuzd, the Sun of Light and
Summer. Beneath the snow, and in the frozen crevices of the trees, in the
chinks of the earth, sealed up by the signet of frost, were the seeds of
the life that would replenish the air in time to come. The buzzing crowds
of summer were still under the snow.
This forest land is marked by the myriads of insects that roam about it
in the days of sunshine. Of all the million million heathbells - multiply
them again by a million million more - that purple the acres of rolling
hills, mile upon mile, there is not one that is not daily visited by
these flying creatures. Countless and incalculable hosts of the
yellow-barred hover-flies come to them; the heath and common, the moor
and forest, the hedgerow and copse, are full of insects. They rise under
foot, they rise from the spray brushed by your arm as you pass, they
settle down in front of you - a rain of insects, a coloured shower. Legion
is a little word for the butterflies; the dry pastures among the woods
are brown with meadow-brown; blues and coppers float in endless
succession; all the nations of Xerxes' army were but a handful to these.
In their millions they have perished; but somewhere, coiled up, as it
were, and sealed under the snow, there must have been the mothers and
germs of the equally vast crowds that will fill the atmosphere this year.
The great bumble-bee that shall be mother of hundreds, the yellow wasp
that shall be mother of thousands, were hidden there somewhere. The food
of the migrant birds that are coming from over sea was there dormant
under the snow. Many nations have a tradition of a former world destroyed
by a deluge of water, from the East to the West, from Greece to Mexico,
where the tail of a comet was said to have caused the flood; but in the
strange characters of the Zend is the legend of an ark (as it were)
prepared against the snow. It may be that it is the dim memory of a
glacial epoch. In this deep coombe, amid the dark oaks and snow, was the
fable of Zoroaster. For the coming of Ormuzd, the Light and Life Bringer,
the leaf slept folded, the butterfly was hidden, the germ concealed,
while the sun swept upwards towards Aries.
There is nothing so wearying as a long frost - the endless monotony, which
makes one think that the very fault we usually find with our climate - its
changeableness - is in reality its best quality. Rain, mist,
gales - anything; give us anything but weary, weary frost. But having once
fixed its mind, the weather will not listen to the usual signs of
alteration.
The larks sang at last high up against the grey cloud over the
frost-bound earth.
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