THE WHITE STORK
In the afternoon little Tsamani would go in the company of Fatima, his mother, to the flat roof of his father’s house, but in the morning he was allowed to go up there by himself, with only the little slave girl Ayesha to guard him.
The happiest hours of Tsamani’s young life were passed upon the flat house-top, where he could see the Tensift river winding its way among the palms, and the Atlas mountains with their peaks covered in snow, and the wonderful tower called Kutubia, that flanks the Mosque of the Library. He could see one of the markets, crowded with heavily laden camels and noisy tribesmen from the South; and at times when the Sultan was in the city he would watch him riding in state under the green umbrella that is Morocco’s symbol of sovereignty. These sights pleased Tsamani, and delighted the little slave-girl, who was at once his guardian and his playmate; but Father and Mother Stork pleased him most of all.
When the warm spring weather came, and most of the storks in Marrakesh took their long flight oversea to cooler climes, Father Stork and Mother Stork remained behind. She sat in her rough nest upon three white eggs and he stood on one leg by her side, with his neck bent, and his bill resting on his breast. They both looked at Tsamani with great interest, perhaps because he was the son of a powerful governor—more likely because they were sorry for him on account of his loneliness. For, though Tsamani had a very soft white djellaba and bright yellow slippers, he was a lonely boy enough—not half so happy as many of the little beggars who ran all over the streets in the bazaars, as merry as they were hungry.
Father Stork made a great rattling noise with his bill, and his mate responded rather more quietly.
“That’s a funny noise, O Father of the Red Legs,” said Tsamani. “I can’t make it with my mouth.”
“No,” said Father Stork, “I don’t suppose you can. And you can’t fly, and you can’t catch frogs and fish, and you can’t build a nest or hatch eggs—can you, little Tsamani? But don’t let that worry you, for grown-up men can’t do these things either, and never think how foolish they are.”
“You are very clever, I know,” said little Tsamani, wondering. “And my father has told me you are very good too. Where do you come from, and where have the other storks gone?”
“I must tell you,” replied Father Stork rather pompously, “for it is impossible to know too much about us. We are, perhaps, the most interesting, the most highly honoured of all birds that fly. Our wisdom, our virtue have been the talk of all ages. We have been favoured by every nation, but the followers of Mohammed have always treated us more kindly than the others. You are a Mohammedan, and this house was built by your great-great-grandfather. Since he built it some of my family have always lived in this corner of the roof. We remain here when our children have joined the great procession to the North, and give up our place to one or other of the children only when we have gone on the still greater journey from which there is no return. Some day you will be a man and the friend of our family, so it is right that I should tell you all you want to know.”
“Why do you sit so closely by your nest?” asked the little boy.
“Because all storks are not honest,” replied the Father of the Red Legs. “These sticks that make the nest are collected with great difficulty and hard work. A dishonest stork—and there are such birds, I’m sorry to say—waits for the parent to leave his nest, and then steals his best twigs. So one has to be very careful.”
The little slave-girl came across the roof-top, but she only heard Father Stork clapping his beak—she could not understand anything of the words he spoke. She was not a “True Believer,” only a little girl stolen by slave-raiders from the Western Sudan, and brought across the terrible desert to the slave-market in Marrakesh, where Tsamani’s father had bought her for a little pile of silver Moorish dollars, amounting in value to about twelve English pounds. It was no part of her business to interfere if her little charge stood by the storks’ nest and Father Stork made that rattling noise with his bill. She was content to stroll round the roof, listening to the tinkle of the camels’ bells, looking down at the people in the streets beyond, or at her master’s other slaves who worked in the patio below, and passed the hours singing, shouting or quarrelling as fancy urged them.
“We have been a long time in the world,” began the stork. “Even in the Bible—which is as the Koran to people in the far countries whither my relatives go—there is a reference to us. A prophet, Jeremiah by name, testified to our wisdom as he watched us in Palestine gathering for our yearly flight. ‘Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth his appointed times,’ he said, realising, as he did, that we followed the seasons with never a mistake or approach to hesitation. His people, the Jews, ancestors of the Hudis who live to-day in the Mellah, called us Chassidim, which means the pious ones, because they understood something of our great love for our children. Can you wonder, then, if we storks are proud? Yet storks were not always birds.”
“What were you?” asked the astonished Tsamani.
“The first stork was born a Sultan,” replied the bird solemnly. “He was a merry soul, but had no fear of Allah. He sat at the head of his high staircase and received his wazeers and subjects. One day, to make them ridiculous, he had the stairs greased; and when grave, pious men were about to salute him, they slipped and fell upon those behind, and all were sorely hurt and confused. Among those hurt was a very great saint whose groans were heard in heaven. Then Allah was wrath with the Sultan, who sat back on his throne convulsed with laughter, moving his head so that his long beard fell and rose from his breast. In an instant the beard became a bill—the Sultan was turned to a stork, and in place of his laughter one heard the chatter of his bill. But happily, on account of our high descent, and our great love for our children, we are set above all other birds.”
“Are you as fond of your three white eggs as my mother is fond of me?” asked Tsamani in astonishment.
“Every bit,” replied Father Stork; and Mother Stork repeated the words after him in a lower tone. “They are to us more than all the wealth of Marrakesh, and when, in the fulness of time, the shells open and the three little babies are given to us they will be dearer still. You must wait patiently until their day arrives, and then you will be able to see for yourself.”
“O, little master,” said the slave-girl, “it is time to descend. The sun is hot, and thy lady mother will await thee.”
So Tsamani went down to the hareem of his father’s house, where his mother passed most of her day lying on soft cushions and eating sweets and contradicting his father’s other wives and favourites because she was above them all. And when he went upon the roof with her in the afternoon the voices of the storks were no more to him than they were to her—no more than the click-clack of their long heavy bills. But on the following morning the sound had a meaning for him—to his great delight.
Sometimes Father Stork would relieve Mother Stork in the performance of her duties, for, as he said: “Our love is equal, why then should the service not be divided?” And in the course of a few days there were three little storks in the nest, with down for feathers, and such awkward bodies and ugly heads on them that you and I, not knowing better, would have laughed. Tsamani was rather disappointed when he saw them for the first time, but Father Stork reassured him.
“Look at me,” he said, putting his second leg firmly on the ground, and lifting the heavy bill off his breast. “I am a big, fine bird—nearer four feet long than three. See how beautifully my bright red bill contrasts with the black of my great wing-coverts and the chief quill feathers, and the pure white of the rest of my body. Look at my bright red legs and toes; think what an effective finish they give to me. Two of my children will grow to be like me, as they are males; the third will be like her mother—not quite as large and not so brightly coloured as the others. And all the big feathers will be brown before they are black.”
Each bird in turn would fly from the roof to the pools in the gardens of the Moorish grandees, and would come back with food for the little ones. If the father went, the mother stayed; if the father stayed, the mother went; the nestlings were never left alone by night or day. It was hard work, for the three babies were anxious to grow and to have feathers in place of down, and to be able to fly or flutter to the ponds and feed themselves. “Sometimes,” said Father Stork, “they try too soon, and tumble down into the street and are killed; at other times they must stop half-way because of exhaustion—but then every Moslem picks them up and returns them to their nest, for it would be a terrible misfortune to harm one of us. If some were hurt we should all leave the country.”
“Far away to the north-west,” continued Father Stork, “there is a country called Great Britain, and we used to go there every year; but when men saw us they would say that we were very rare, and would shoot us, without pausing to think that that would make us rarer still. So for fifty years we have not been to those islands, and I do not think we shall ever go there again, though one or two stray birds may alight there, blown out of their course by a gale. Though we are kind to all who treat us well, we can fight when it is necessary to do so. We aim at the head and eyes of those who ill-use us; but against men who carry guns no fighting avails, so we leave them—and now on all the myriad roofs of Great Britain no stork builds its nest.”
“Are the Mohammedans the only people who are good to you, O Father of the Red Legs?” asked Tsamani.
“They are our best friends,” said the Stork; “though in parts of Europe we are welcomed, particularly in Holland, where the people respect us for the love we bear our little ones. They tell the story of a great fire in one of their cities called Delft, where some storks, unable to remove their nestlings, died with them. We thought nothing of it—any storks would have done the same; but the good people of Delft were very impressed and told all the Dutch folk far and wide, and increased our welcome from that day. They even put up cart-wheels on poles for us to build our nests on in districts where the house-roofs have no flat surface that will help us. As a rule, when we go to a town where the inhabitants are of mixed race and religion, we find out where the Mohammedan quarter is, and build there. Uneducated people think it is because we prefer one faith to another; but the truth, of course, is that the Mohammedans respect us, welcome our arrival, regret our departure and never disturb our nests. They even say that we bring good luck to the dwellers in the house we choose for our building.”
“To-day,” said Father Stork, a week or two after the last conversation, “we are taking our young to the marshes. Ask your mother to let you walk in the Sultan’s garden near the great pomegranate orchards by the Spanish gate.”
So Tsamani hurried down to the hareem and the room where his mother lay upon soft cushions, with her gimbri for company; and she gave her permission readily enough, and called the old lady who had charge of the women’s quarter, and bade her go to the main courtyard and summon two men slaves to accompany Tsamani and his little nurse to see that no harm befell them.
So the little party went out to the gardens that lie round the great green-tiled palace of the Sultan, and when they came to the marsh by the orchard of pomegranates Tsamani cried to his little companion: “O Ayesha, let us stay here and play.” He had seen Father and Mother Stork with their family on the marsh. Then the two men slaves sat in the shade of the red-blossomed pomegranate trees, and little Ayesha picked wild flowers, while Tsamani went up to the stork family and saw the little ones that had only just as many feathers as enabled them to fly feebly for short distances. They splashed about in the shallow waters of the marsh, and tried to catch frogs and little fishes; but they were not skilful enough to do so; they could secure nothing better than a few worms, and would have fared ill but for Father and Mother Stork, from whom no frogs or fishes could escape. When the parent birds caught anything they washed it very carefully in the water before giving it to their young to eat, and no trouble seemed too much for them in satisfying the hunger of their little ones. Tsamani watched them while the two slaves slept under the pomegranate trees; and Ayesha, picking more flowers than she could carry, forgot that the sun’s heat was growing greater.
“You must go home soon,” said Father Stork at last, “or you will be hurt by the sun, and you will have to go to the hospital, just as our family has to go when it is sick or ailing.”
“Is there a hospital for storks?” said Tsamani, very much astonished.
“Certainly there is,” replied Father Stork. “It is in the old northern city of Fez, home of pious and learned Moors, and was founded many generations ago by a good Moslem. All sick or wounded storks are brought there and put in the charge of the pious men who conduct the hospital. The ailing ones are doctored, the hungry ones are fed, the dead are buried. It is not for nothing that we serve Moorish cities.”
“Serve Moorish cities,” repeated Tsamani curiously. “How do you do that?”
“We are the scavengers,” said Father Stork. “In the western countries men are employed to remove the rubbish and refuse from the houses, but here and all over the East we take their places. To be sure, we cannot eat the offal, as the vultures do; but we eat a great deal that would spread sickness through any city if left lying on the ground under the hot sun. If there were no gardens and river-shallows here we could live in the city itself, and would thrive there. Very many of my family keep in the city of Fez, although there is a river and they can go out to the marshes if they felt inclined.”
The summer, and the rainy season that takes the place of winter passed, bringing another spring in their train; and still Tsamani spoke to the storks when the weather permitted him to go upon the roof, and learned a great deal of their lives and ways. With the completion of their feathers and the change of colour in their wing quills from brown to black the young birds had gone afield, and were to be seen in the well-watered meadows by the tomb of Sidi Bel Abbas, the saint who wrought so nobly for the poor in his days on earth that he has become the patron of all the beggars in the white-walled city. One sat on a corner of the tomb itself, the others on the flat housetops near the gardens.
“They will go away with this summer,” said Father Stork. “They will join the hundreds of others that came back from the North before the cold weather sets in. Did you not notice how full the gardens became at the beginning of the winter, and how the streets and the market places were full of birds? They do not like the cold weather of Holland and Denmark and Poland, and other countries of Europe, where they go to rear their young. At a given season of the year the desire for home takes them. In spring they seek a milder clime and leave Africa, so that the people of the countries they favour may know that the summer has come.”
“The swallow and the nightingale go with them. Indeed, they go into countries that my family will not visit. Think what those countries have lost. There is France, and there is Britain, for example; no stork builds in either.”
“Do you all come back and go away at the same time from all countries?” asked Tsamani. “And if you do how do you manage it, O Father of the Red Legs?”
“You ask more than I can answer,” replied Father Stork. “I can only tell you that within three days of the start for the North there is not one stork in Morocco that intends to take the journey, and within a week of the time the first stork comes southward from oversea the entire migration is accomplished. It is one of Nature’s secrets that she has chosen to tell to all the birds of passage but has not given to you and your fellow-creatures, and consequently nothing I can say would make the reason clear to you.
“We know when to go and when to return as well as you know when to go to sleep and when to rise. It is bird law. At times the summons comes to us to fly earlier than usual, even before all the eggs are hatched, or the young ones have learned to fly. Then we must forget our love. We must destroy the eggs that are not yet hatched; we must kill the little ones that cannot face the journey. Nothing could be more terrible to us. We would prefer to die for our little ones, but we have no choice but to obey the law. For generations uncounted we have done so, and now it is no more strange to us than the regulation of our day—the morning search for food, the long rest for digestion and contemplation that follows, the evening search for another meal, the following sleep. In a day or two now we shall commence our love-flights, and my wife will fill our nest with eggs once more.”
“What are your love-flights?” said Tsamani.
“Wait a little while, and you will see,” replied Father Stork.
Some two or three mornings later, when Tsamani and Ayesha climbed to the roof-top, Father Stork was no longer to be seen. It was then too late for him to be eating. He should have been standing by the nest, in accordance with custom; but there were no signs of him. Mother Stork sat looking skywards, as though in an ecstasy of happiness.
“I am not lost, Tsamani,” said Father Stork’s voice. It sounded far away up in the sky; but when the boy looked up into the blue his eyes could hardly pierce the dazzling light. He saw nothing for a few minutes, and then Father Stork descended slowly, apparently from the heavens. He was singing a strange new song, such as Tsamani had never heard in all his life before—the song that had lighted so much happiness in the eyes of Mother Stork.
“Listen, Ayesha!” he cried. “Do you hear the white stork’s song.”
“No, no,” laughed stupid Ayesha, showing her beautiful white teeth. “The storks do not sing, my little lord; they chatter with their beaks, but they have no song. The doves in the gardens have more song than storks.” Tsamani said no more; he was afraid to let the girl know that he could hear things she did not dream about.
“Quite right, Tsamani,” said Father Stork, gliding easily and gracefully through the air to the roof’s edge. “To Ayesha there is nothing to be heard but the clattering of my mandibles. To my wife it is a beautiful love-song. She thinks I brought it down from heaven, for I soared out of her sight so high that even to my keen eyes Marrakesh was no more than a dull speck on the ground. Now you shall see my lower love-flight.” So saying, he sprang into the air, and, reaching a point as far from the roof as the roof was from the ground, went through a series of movements that were like those of a great yacht with all her sails set to catch a favouring wind. Tsamani never saw his wings flap, never saw him in any difficulty to turn in an exact angle at a given point; the motion was smooth, easy, graceful, and it thrilled Mother Stork with joy.
“We are great lovers,” said Father Stork, when he had settled; “so well known that all the lovesick youths of Moorish cities ask us to give their messages to the well-beloved. They stand in the white street below and sing to us.”
Once again Mother Stork sat on three eggs, once again Father Stork stood on one leg by the nest-side, his beak upon his breast, and helped in all love and loyalty to fetch the food when the babies came. The weeks hurried towards the summer, the birds were nearly fledged, and one morning when they were feeding in the gardens Father Stork came back hurriedly with another of his tribe. They talked vigorously upon the roof-top and then the newcomer went his way, leaving Father Stork angry and disturbed.
“What is the matter?” asked Tsamani uneasily. He felt sure that trouble was brewing, that some disaster was at hand.
“Matter enough!” said Father Stork gravely. “My companion came to give me and my wife notice that we must join in battle with the ravens on the fourth day from now.”
“Why are you ill friends?” asked the boy.
“That is a secret of stork and raven life that I cannot attempt to explain,” replied Father Stork. “We must fight them and prevail, or must leave this city. The battle will be a few miles from the Dukala Gate. I think we shall win and return. You will soon know.”
All through the third day Tsamani watched and waited, seeing no grown stork on roof or in street, straining eyes and ears in vain. Even the townsfolk were alarmed, and crowded the Mosques, and prayed devoutly.[3]On the following morning he rose when the Mueddin called for the first prayer, and the guardian of the hareem allowed him to pass the door and to climb the steep steps to the roof. He saw the sun come up from the East and he heard the camels’ bells as the caravan moved out to cross the desert, carrying salt, that it might return with slaves. He was listening to the earliest notes of stock-doves in the gardens, when with swift flight a stork swept over the Dukala Gate. He was one of the younger birds of that year’s brood.
“We have won!” he cried. “We have won! The ravens are in full flight. The storks will return to Marrakesh; and my parents sent me to bid you good-bye.”
“Are they well and safe?” cried Tsamani, sorely afraid, for he was old enough to know that he had no other friends.
“They live,” replied the young stork, “but are sorely wounded, and are flying northward, slowly and carefully, to the City of the Sickle, the place of the hospital, where their wounds may be healed. I must return to them. Haply, we may all come back again.”
“How the young stork chatters!” said Ayesha sleepily.
But Tsamani said no word as he went down the narrow stairs, for he felt that he was alone in the world.
[3]
This incident occurred when I was in Southern Morocco where some reliable observers told me that fights between the storks and ravens are of almost annual occurrence.
This incident occurred when I was in Southern Morocco where some reliable observers told me that fights between the storks and ravens are of almost annual occurrence.