Roving East and Roving West | Page 4

now and
then one will descend with a rush and rise carrying a rat or other
delicacy in its claws; but these interruptions of the pattern are only
momentary. For the rest of the time they swirl and circle and never
cease to watch. Bombay also has its predatory crows, who are so bold
that it is unsafe to leave any bright article on the veranda table.
Spectacles, for example, set up a longing in their hearts which they
make no effort to control. But these birds are everywhere. At a wayside
station just outside Calcutta, in the early morning, the passengers all
had tea, and when it was finished and the trays were laid on the
platform, I watched the crows, who were perfectly aware of this custom
and had been approaching nearer and nearer as we drank, dart swiftly to
the sugar basins and carry off the lumps that remained. The crow,
however, is, comparatively speaking, a human being; the kite is
something alien and a cause of fear, and the traveller in India never
loses him. His eye is as coldly attentive to Calcutta as to Bombay.
It is, of course, the indigenous birds of a country that emphasise its
foreignness far more than its people. People can travel. Turbaned heads
are, for example, not unknown in England; but to have green parrots
with long tails flitting among the trees, as they used to flit in my host's
garden in Bombay, is to be in India beyond question. At Raisina we

had mynahs and the babblers, or "Seven Sisters," in great profusion,
and also the King Crow with his imposing tail; while the little striped
squirrels were everywhere. These merry restless little rodents do more
than run and scamper and leap: they seem to be positively lifted into
space by their tails. Their stripes (as every one knows) came directly
from the hand of God, recording for ever how, on the day of creation,
He stroked them by way of approval.
No Indian bird gave me so much pleasure to watch as the speckled
kingfishers, which I saw at their best on the Jumna at Okhla. They
poise in the air above the water with their long bills pointed downwards
at a right-angle to their fluttering bodies, searching the depths for their
prey; and then they drop with the quickness of thought into the stream.
The other kingfisher--coloured like ours but bigger--who waits on an
overhanging branch, I saw too, but the evolutions of the hovering
variety were more absorbing.
When one is travelling by road, the birds that most attract the notice are
the peacocks and the giant cranes; while wherever there are cattle in
any numbers there are the white paddy birds, feeding on their backs--
the birds from which the osprey plumes are obtained. One sees, too,
many kinds of eagle and hawk. In fact, the ornithologist can never be
dull in this country.
Wild animals I had few opportunities to observe, although a mongoose
at Raisina gave me a very amusing ten minutes. At Raisina, also, the
jackals came close to the house at night; and on an early morning ride
in a motorcar to Agra we passed a wolf, and a little later were most
impudently raced and outdistanced by a blackbuck, who, instead of
bolting into security at the sight or sound of man, ran, or rather,
advanced--for his progress is mysterious and magical--beside us for
some forty yards and then,--with a laugh, put on extra speed (we were
doing perhaps thirty miles an hour) and disappeared ahead. All about
Muttra we dispersed monkeys up the trees and into the bushes as we
approached. Next to the parrots it is the monkeys that most convince
the traveller that he is in a strange tropical land. And the flying foxes.
Nothing is more strange than a tree full of these creatures sleeping

pendant by day, or their silent swift black movements by night.
I saw no snakes wild, but in the Bacteriological Laboratory at Parel in
Bombay, which Lt.-Col. Glen Liston controls with so much zeal and
resourcefulness, I was shown the process by which the antidotes to
snake poisoning are prepared, for dispersion through the country. A
cobra or black snake is released from his cage and fixed by the
attendant with a stick pressed on his neck a little below the head. The
snake is then firmly and safely held just above this point between the
finger and thumb, and a tumbler, with a piece of flannel round its edge,
is proffered to it to bite. As the snake bites, a clear yellow fluid, like
strained honey in colour and thickness, flows into the glass from the
poison fangs. This poison is later injected in small doses into the veins
of horses