rURlFICATION. 145 



solitary, and without communication — mostly silent — they flock to 

 the banquet by the hundred, and nothing disturbs them. They 

 quarrel not among themselves, they take no heed of the passer-by. 

 They imperturbably accomplish their functions in a stern kind of 

 gravity ; with decency and propriety ; the corpse disappears, the skin 

 remains. In a moment a frightful mass of putrid fermentation, which 

 man had never dared to draw near, has vanished — has re-entered the 

 pure and wholesome current of universal life. 



It is strange that the more useful they are to us, the more odious 

 we find them. We are unwilling to accept them for what they are, 

 to regard them in their true role, as the beneficent cressets of living 

 fire through which nature passes everything that might coiTupt the 

 higher life. For this purpose she has provided them with an admir- 

 able apparatus, which receives, destroys, transforms, without ever 

 rejecting, wearying, or even satisfying itself Let them devour a 

 hippopotamus, and they are still famished. To the guUs (those 

 vultures of the sea) a whale seems but a reasonable morsel ! They 

 will dissect it and clear it away better than the most skilful whalers. 

 As long as aught of it remains they remain ; fire at them, and they 

 intrepidly return to it in the mouth of your guns. Nothing dislodges 

 the vulture on the carcass of a hippopotamus. Levaillant killed one 

 of these birds, which, though mortally wounded, still plucked away 

 scraps of flesh. Was he starving ? Not he ; food was found in his 

 stomach weighing six pounds ! 



This is automatic gluttony, rather than ferocity. If their aspect is 

 sad and sombre, nature has favoured them for the most part with a 

 delicate and feminine ornament, the soft white down about their 

 neck. 



Standing before them, you feel yourself in the presence of the 

 ministers of death ; but of death tranquil and natural, and not ol 

 murder. Like the elements, they are serious, grave, inaccusable, at 

 bottom innocent — rather, let us say, deserving. Though gifted with 

 a vital force which resumes, subdues, absorbs everything, they are 

 subject, more than any other beings, to general influences ; are swayed 



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