54 BIRDS IN LEGEND 



addled, whereupon these bad ones are at once broken." 

 It is to this fiction that Southey refers in Thalaba, the 

 Destroyer: 



With such a look as fables say 



The mother ostrich fixes on her eggs, 



Till that intense affection 



Kindle its light of life. 



Hence, as Burnaby tells us, ostrich eggs were hung in 

 some Mohammedan mosques as a reminder that "God 

 will break evil-doers as the ostrich her worthless eggs." 

 Professor E. A. Grosvenor notes in his elaborate volumes 

 on Constantinople, that in the turbeh of Eyouk, the 

 holiest building and shrine in the Ottoman world, are 

 suspended "olive lamps and ostrich eggs, the latter sig- 

 nificant of patience and faith." Their meanings or at 

 any rate the interpretations vary locally, but the shells 

 themselves are favorite mosque ornaments all over Islam, 

 and an extensive trans-Saharan caravan-trade in them 

 still exists. Ostrich eggs as well as feathers were im- 

 ported into ancient Egypt and Phoenicia from the Land 

 of Punt (Somaliland) and their shells have been re- 

 covered from early tombs, or sometimes clay models of 

 them, as at Hu, where Petrie found an example decorated 

 with an imitation of the network of cords by which it 

 could be carried about, just as is done to this day by the 

 Central-African negroes, who utilize these shells as water- 

 bottles, and carry a bundle of them in a netting bag. 

 Other examples were painted; and Wilkinson surmises 

 that these were suspended in the temples of the ancient 

 Egyptians as they now are in those of the Copts. The 

 Punic tombs about Carthage, and those of Mycenae, in 

 Greece, have yielded painted shells of these eggs; and 



