The Emperor's Elephant(60)

As was their custom, our boatmen selected an isolated spot to spend the night well away from the nearest settlement. They tied up our boats to the bank in an area thickly overgrown with tall bushes. Though it was difficult to get ashore, Walo and I managed to clamber onto the bank and found a faint path, leading inland. We followed it, Walo in the lead, until he stopped suddenly. He had seen something in the undergrowth. He veered off the path to investigate, then beckoned to me to join him. Lying on the ground in a small clearing was the body of a dead bird. From a little distance I thought it might be a swan. But as I drew closer, I saw that it was a bird unlike anything that I had remotely imagined. It was as if someone had joined the body of a large heron to the head and neck of a goose. The creature had once stood on very long sticklike legs and must have been nearly five feet tall.

‘I wonder what food it eats?’ wondered Walo aloud.

I looked at him sharply, then remembered how he had immediately deduced from the terrible teeth in the mouth of the manticore that it was a meat-eater. The dead bird lying on the ground before us had neither the flat shovelling beak of a duck nor the stabbing lance of the heron. Its beak was over-size, a misshapen excrescence like a large bean that curved downward at the tip. At the top of the beak were two long slits like nostrils.

‘I don’t remember seeing it in the Book of Beasts,’ I said, ‘though surely it should be in it.’

The most extraordinary thing about the animal was its remarkable colour. The body feathers were white shaded with a delicate pink that deepened in hue along the neck and towards the wing tips and tail until it became a bright, luxuriant red. The stilt-like legs were a shocking deep vermilion. The colours were so striking that even the most skilled painter would have had trouble in capturing its splendour.

‘Perhaps Abram can tell us more about it,’ I suggested. ‘We had better be getting back to the boats.’

We were about to turn back when there came a confused, discordant clamour like the honking of many geese. It came from above us and I looked up. The tall bushes allowed a view of a small circle of sky. All of a sudden it was filled with the shapes of the strange birds, scores of them, gliding past on outstretched wings as they descended through the air, coming in to land nearby. They flew with necks stiffly outstretched and long legs trailing behind them. There was a glimpse of black underwings.

‘Quick! We must go and see. Maybe they will appoint a guardian to watch over them while they are on the ground, just like the cranes,’ Walo blurted, pulling at my arm.

‘They’re giant herons,’ I guessed.

He shook his head. ‘A heron flies with a curved neck. They flew with their necks straight, like cranes.’

He plunged off through the undergrowth, heading in the direction we had seen the birds descend. After some minutes we worked clear of the bushes and emerged on the rim of a broad lagoon. I caught my breath in astonishment. The lagoon was very shallow, no more than a few inches deep. Standing in the water on their weird stilt-legs were hundreds of the strange birds, clustered in a vast flock. They lifted their heads on their long, sinuous necks as Walo and I appeared, and turned to inspect us. A few had their heads buried underwater, and as they raised them, the water dripped from their glistening beaks. At that same moment the setting sun eased from behind a cloud and flooded the scene with reddish light. The slanting rays gave the birds’ plumage an unearthly glow, infusing them with every hue of red from pink to bright crimson. There was not a breath of wind and the still surface of the lagoon served as a mirror, doubling the illusion. It looked as if the entire spindly legged flock was about to catch fire.

*

As soon as we got back to the boats, Walo insisted that I search the bestiary to make sure there was no illustration of the wondrous creatures.

‘Their picture must be there,’ he pleaded.

‘I’m afraid not,’ I told him after I had checked every page. ‘A bird called a phoenix glows red. But that’s only at the end of its life just before it bursts into flames. Besides, it lives in Arabia.’

‘Maybe the birds we saw flew here from Arabia, like those cranes that I see flying high over my forest each year.’

I was sorry to disappoint him. ‘According to the book, only a single phoenix is alive at any time and it lives for five hundred years. When it is ready to die, it builds a nest in the top of a palm tree and bursts into flames. From the ashes arises another phoenix, a young one. It too will live for another five hundred years.’

Walo clung to his hopes. ‘What about the phoenix’s food?’

‘The book states that the phoenix lives on the perfume of frankincense.’