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"I wouldn't bring you, Mary, if I didn't feel sure." If she had not felt sure she wouldn't have put on the grey kid gloves, the mantle and the bonnet with the white marabou feather. You don't dress like that to go shopping in Durlingham. "You mean," Mary said, "that we shall see him." Her heart beat calmly, stilled by the sheer incredibility of the adventure. "Of course we shall see him. Mrs.
My boy, who had been with marabou and egret poachers in the swamps and rice-fields of the lower Rufigi, knew the value of these snowy feathers. Of the many plagues that beset this land of Africa not the least are the biting flies. Just as every tree and bush has thorns, so every fly has a sting. Some bite by day only, some by night, and others at all times.
The various birds of prey immediately collected buzzards, vultures, crows, and the great Marabou stork. I observed a great bare-necked vulture almost succeed in turning the body over by pulling at the flesh of the arm at the opposite side to that where it stood.
A number of Marabou storks had also arrived, and were standing proudly among the crowd of vultures, preparing to perform the duty of sextons, when the skin should become sufficiently decomposed. Throughout all the countries that I had traversed, these birds were in enormous numbers.
She had sat like that since the train began to pull, ready to get out the instant it stopped at Durlingham. "I feel sure it's going to be all right," she said. The white marabou feather nodded. Her gentle mauve and sallow face was growing old, with soft curdlings and puckerings of the skin; but she still carried her head high, nodding at you with her air of gaiety, of ineffable intrigue.
At that great elevation they are in an exceedingly cool temperature, therefore they require no water; but some birds that make long flights over arid deserts, such as the Marabou stork, and the buzzard, are provided with water-sacks; the former in an external bag a little below the throat, the latter in an internal sack, both of which carry a large supply.
It is quite false that it was owing to the appearance of a sail which, it is pretended, was descried, but of which, for my part, I saw nothing, that Bonaparte exclaimed, "Fortune, have you abandoned me? I ask only five days!" No such thing occurred. It was one o'clock in the morning of the 2d of July when we landed on the soil of Egypt, at Marabou, three leagues to the west of Alexandria.
Their nests are only little hollows made on these same sand-banks, without any attempt of concealment; they watch them closely, and frighten away the marabou and crows from their eggs by feigned attacks at their heads. When man approaches their nests, they change their tactics, and, like the lapwing and ostrich, let one wing drop and make one leg limp, as if lame.
I have frequently known the bodies of large animals, such as elephants and buffaloes, to lie for days beneath the shade of the dense nabbuk bushes, unattended by a single vulture; whereas, if visible, they would have been visited by these birds in thousands. Vultures and the Marabou stork fly at enormous altitudes.
No. 2 is the common buzzard: this bird, so well known for its extreme daring, is omnipresent, and trusts generally to sight, as it will stoop at a piece of red cloth in mistake for flesh; thus proving that it depends more upon vision than smell. No. 3 is the red-faced small vulture. No. 4 is the large bare-throated vulture. No. 5, the Marabou stork, sometimes accompanied by the adjutant.
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