A CITY OF BIRDS 53 



even to the collector who is always so ready to break other 

 people's necks to fill his cabinets with egg-shells. Though 

 the birds were sometimes five hundred feet above me, 

 the beat of the wings was always audible, and when 

 they half-closed their vans and dropped a hundred feet 

 sheer before catching themselves up by a rapid shooting 

 out of them, the noise was like a wind. Now and then 

 both birds alighted on the bluff opposite their nest and 

 caressed each other, the male locking mandibles with 

 his mate and swaying gently with her, or nibbling at 

 the hairs at the base of her bill with caressing murmurs, 

 fondling sounds totally different from his normal voice. 

 They were seldom silent, and while the hen bird was 

 on the nest, her mate floated above the cliffs with 

 primaries outspread, like the fingers of a hand, uttering 

 his loud, rumbling bark-growl-croaks, like a bishop 

 reading the Litany. The sounds went tumbling down 

 the gullies and against the bastions of the steepled rock, 

 " ancestral voices, prophesying war." 



There is something in us which responds to the raven 

 in his natural haunts, as men with a great literature 

 behind us in which he plays his grim part, because his 

 aloofness and majesty are an expression in terms of life 

 of desert places which owe nothing to us and our machines, 

 and because, in the words of Taylor, the water-poet, 

 he is " old, old, very old," older even than ourselves, 

 who took our human form a million years ago. The 

 tragedy of mankind is not a little thing, but it takes 

 a belittling shape and a tragedy without rhythm and 

 dignity is a pitiful thing indeed. The raven is essentially 

 a tragic bird, in his shape and colour, in the nature of 

 his fastnesses, in his fierce temper, in his associations, 

 and in the gloomy destiny he has suffered at our hands. 

 But he is no more vulgar with it than the lonely places 

 he inhabits, of which he is the living symbol, and the 

 sight of him recaptures for us the commingled tragedy and 

 sublimity of the human story. Outlined against the bluff, 

 like a bird statue hewn out of night or the rocks of his 

 home, he who has given so much dark inspiration to 

 legend, tragedy, verse and history, drop down into the 

 shadowy sea of twilight, himself a shadow, and, when 



