Edmund Selous

“ How the cormorants dive and fish in it, how the gull tears at the drifted carcase of its kind, how the puffins, in ceaseless flight between ocean and their myriad burrows, arch and dome it in! Oh, it is a fine apartment! Its portals on either side are columns of spouting foam, and beyond lies the wild, houseless sea. A seal's dormitory!—how well do the wild things choose! So here, at once, one learns something different to what one is told. Seals care nothing about tides when they can get great slanting slabs that lie high and dry above them. ”

“ Two seas of surpassing splendour: and long lines of heavy purple cloud hang, like ocean islands, in the one of the sky. The other, the true sea, has a strangely opaque appearance—it does not look like water at all. It is this that makes the morning; all else is dark and shrouded. Standing here, upon a corner-stone of this island, one looks from night into day. Just before the sun rises the clouds about become rosy red, and then take fire; but from the moment he has risen they begin to fade back into grey again. All flame himself, he puts all other out. ”

“ For a moment it is almost hidden in the foam and swirl, the next it emerges out of it, and mounts with powerful beats into the air, its head stretched shorewards, and its bent claws struck deep into the body of a large fish, beneath the weight of which it labours. Slowly at first, but gaining strength and speed as it ascends, it heads towards the cliff’s face. Already it can see the crag on which its eyrie hangs, when, like a thunderbolt, and with the shriek or laugh of a demon, the lonely watcher, who has marked it all, hurls itself downwards on spoiler and spoil. ”

“ Can anything be happier than the life of a bird? Surely not. Only to fly, just think how delightful that must be, and then to be always living in green, leafy palaces under the bright, warm sun and the blue sky. For I must tell you that these birds we are going to talk about live where the trees are always leafy, where the sun is always bright and the sky always blue. So they are always happy. Even if a bird could be unhappy in winter—which I am not at all sure about—there is no winter there. Now the happier any creature is the more cruel it is to kill it and take that happiness away from it. ”

“ Poised in air, in the neighbourhood of some hive, they watch the issuing and returning stream, and, making swift choice of a victim, sweep, like the wingéd furies that they are, upon him. There is a sharp, shrilly sound, as the bee’s wings vibrate, for a moment, more rapidly, then the fatal legs wrap her round, and, pressed tightly to the oppressor’s body, she is borne to some shrub or flower, in the shade or pleasant fragrance of which the juices of her body are sucked out, through a hole specially made to allow of their passage. ”

“ There is a sinking towards it of one of the dark shadows—swift beyond telling, but so soft that the speed is not realised—the object is covered, lost, and almost with a jerk, the eye—or rather the brain—realises that it has been caught in the descent. Empty, and now unregarded, the robbed bird sweeps on, the pirates sweep back to the heather, the cloud of witnesses disperse themselves, and, as with us each day, each hour, things smooth themselves again over the high-placed acts of successful villainy. ”

“ Sometimes, indeed, the wings do bend just a little—for, after all, they have a joint—but the straight-set attitude is more germane to them, and soon they assume it again, shooting forward so briskly, yet softly, that one seems to hear a soft little musical click.
And thus this dream and joy of glorious motion, this elemental spirit of a bird, floats and flickers along, cradled in air, looking like a shadow upon it, sweeping and gliding, rising and falling, in circles of consummate ease. ”

“ But if you had wings like the Birds of Paradise, and could fly over the tops of the trees that make the forest, and look down into a leafy meadow instead of up into a leafy sky, then you would see the most gloriously beautiful flowers growing in that meadow, just as the daisies and buttercups grow in the meadows that you run over, here. For flowers love the light of the sun, and they struggle up into it through the leaves that keep it out. ”

“ Sometimes he dips so smoothly and still-ly down that one seems hardly to miss him from where he was; there is just a swirl on the stream—which seems, now, to represent him—and that all but silent sound, so cool and pleasant, as of water sucked down into water. Or, swimming smoothly down the current, he stops suddenly, brings the neck stiffly and straightly forward, with eye fixed intently, severely on the water—piercing down into it as though making a point—and then down he goes with a click, almost a snap, flirting the water-drops up into the air with his tiny little mite of a tail. ”

“ For here is the tropic sea, blue as a sapphire, gleaming like a diamond, glancing and throbbing with such jewels of light that it looks as though thousands of silver fishes were jumping in the meshes of a golden net, flung down by the sun from the sky. All at once, from amidst these myriads of sparkles a number flash higher, leap into the air, and fly, like bright arrows, towards you. Onwards they come, and from being light only, they pass into form and substance, begin to live, to move with sense and volition, and, all at once, they are fishes, flying with wings over their home of the sea. ”

“ I have never seen anything like such vivid hues on the surface of rock or cliff exposed to the light of day, nor, indeed, in any landscape, if flowers and the autumn tints of leaves are excluded. Gaudily painted stage scenery, some enchanted or robber's cavern in a pantomime—Ali Baba's, for instance—is really the best comparison I can think of, nor shall I ever again think these exaggerated. Nature is really harder to outdo or burlesque than one may fancy—even on the stage, where the effort is so constantly, and, one would swear, successfully made. ”

“ The effect of a number of these points of brilliancy, gleaming out, now here, now there, on the soft night air of the tropics, is inexpressibly beautiful, as though, in a smaller firmament, innumerable miniature stars had ceaseless birth and death.
Women, who like to emphasise their own beauty, or the want of it, by placing themselves in juxtaposition with every lovely thing in nature, and care not if a thousand deaths go to help one smile or glance, have not forgotten the fire-flies. ”

“ Oh, how interesting it would be to see it—to find out one of those little, open places where the moss is all pressed smooth and firm, and then to hide somewhere near, and wait there quietly, quietly, without making a sound, all alone in the great, wild, lonely forest, until at last—at last—there is a crimson flash amongst the tree-trunks, and then another and another and another, as bird after bird comes flying or walking to the ball-room, and the dance begins. ”

“ Nothing else but the birds in their thousands; and there, on the insensate wave or rocks, amidst spectators as indifferent as they, one of them is slowly, methodically, almost fastidiously, hacking, hewing, and picking another to death. You see the struggles, the flights of escape, the horrid, remorseless re-catchings; you see it proceeding and proceeding, see the wound growing larger and larger, the blood running redder and redder, and reason, with an impetuous inrush, says to you, suddenly, and as though for the first time, "This is nature—this is your God of Love—His scheme, His plan!" ”

“ To have chaffinches, greenfinches, bramblings, tree-sparrows, buntings, yellow-hammers, blue-tits, starlings, perhaps a blackbird or two, pheasants and partridges, all about one and quite near, one should choose a bitterly cold day with a biting wind driving the snowflakes before it, and the snow itself whitening the landscape, but not so deeply as to cover things beyond a bird's power of scratching. Rising early, one gets to the stack whilst it is still dark. ”

“ Men are gone, and gulls now take their place, become ennobled for want of a superior. Like snowy-toga'd Roman senators, they stand grouped about, or walk over the grassy amphitheatre—their natural senate-house—and it is wonderful with how slight an effort of the imagination—or indeed with none—the dissonant cries and shrieks, the clang and the jangle, become as the dignified utterance, eloquent oratory, to which one has sat and listened, spell-bound, in the gallery of the House of Commons. ”

“ High-fliers they are for the most part, keeping to the tops of the trees, but every morning, and always at the same time, they make a descent into the glades and alleys of the forest, where for a little they flap lazily backwards and forwards, now in eclipse, now flashing forth into sunlight, as though to flaunt their beauties in the face of the lower world. ”

“ But now the rain is beginning to fall, and it comes down faster and faster, and there is a muttering in the dull sky, and, all at once, a flash of lightning leaps out of the darkness, cutting it as though with a red, jagged knife, and for an instant it is day, and you see the leaves on the trees, and the rain-drops falling through the air, and the fields with haystacks standing in them, or rivers winding through them, and the distant hills, and the line where the earth meets the heavens. ”

“ We may imagine one—the more favoured suitor—sitting on the ground, his back, as is usual, against the trunk of a tree, and his arm flung carelessly about the object of his regard; the great fingers of the wonderfully human hand burying themselves in her fur. All at once the peaceful nature of the scene is rudely disturbed by the frowning presence of another male, whilst the silence is as suddenly broken by a terrific barking cry, passing into a long, loud, sullen, reverberating roar. ”

“ Always, however, or almost always, one of the birds—and this one I take to be the female—is more eager, has a more soliciting manner, and tender-begging look, than the other. It is she who, as a rule, commences and draws the male bird on. She looks fondly up at him, and raising her bill to his, as though beseeching a kiss, just touches with it, in raising, the feathers of his throat—an action light, but full of endearment. And in every way she shows herself the most desirous, and, in fact, so worries and pesters the poor male gull that often, to avoid her importunities, he flies away. ”

“ They sit high and light on the water, duck their heads under it, and throw it over them with their wings. Between their ablutions they often sport in the air, swooping at and chasing one another. Their motions are such as one might imagine those of elemental spirits to be, and their wild cry adds to this imaginary resemblance. Oh, that cry, that wild, wild cry, that music of the winds, the clouds, the drifting rain and mist—like them, free as them, voicing their freedom, making their spirit articulate! ”

“ This crest is just the shape of a tea-cosy, so that it looks as if some one had put a little tea-cosy made of the most splendid blood-red, fiery, crimson-sunset feathers right over the bird's head and covered it quite up. You see no beak at all, and it does look so funny to see a bird without a beak—almost as funny as it would to see a beak without a bird. ”