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Updated: May 27, 2025
Here and there were visible swampy places covered with water plants and reeds in which were teeming wild geese, ducks, doves, storks, pelicans, and ibises. "Behold, lord," said Otoes, "a picture of our country, Quench, Egypt. Osiris fell in love with this strip of laud in the midst of deserts; he covered it with plants and living creatures, so as to have from them profit.
The soaring flecks of black were flocks of graceful ibises sailing hour after hour on tireless wings and indistinguishable from vultures save for the long, outstretched necks and legs; for, outlined against the grayish heavens all the winged creatures appeared dark, no matter what their color.
Behind these swarmed vaguely and indistinctly three hundred and sixty-five Decans, the familiar dæmons of each day. Next appeared the terrestrial deities: the second Osiris, Haroeri, Typhon, the second Isis, Nephthys, the dog-headed Anubis, Thoth, Busiris, Bubastis, the great Serapis. Beyond, in the shade, were faintly seen idols in form of animals, oxen, crocodiles, ibises, hippopotami.
There were swans, shining white, with black heads and necks, flying in wedge-shaped flocks, and rose-coloured spoonbills, and flamingoes with scarlet wings tipped with black, and ibises, and ducks of different colours, and many other birds, both water and land, appeared, flock after flock, all flying as fast as their wings could bear them towards the north.
Sometimes they would soar up in the air in the form of hawks with men's heads, or like ibises with a slow lagging flight, and sometimes sweep over the desert like gray shapeless shadows, or glide across the sand like snakes; or they would creep out of the tombs, howling like hungry dogs.
Pelicans and flamingoes, geese and ducks, storks and herons, ibises and cranes, bitterns and lapwings, flew in dark flocks of manifold forms from all directions.
"I was thinking," Annie replied chokingly, "of some queer long-legged birds I saw once in a cage in a park. I really don't know whether they were ibises or cranes, or survivals of species, but anyway, the little long-legged ones all walked just the same way in a file behind a tall long-legged one, who walked precisely in the same way, and all of a sudden, I seemed to see us all like that.
The ibises were of the brightest scarlet, except that the tips of their wings were black; the spoonbills were equally beautiful, their general colour being a delicate rose-tint, with a rich lustrous carmine on their shoulders and breast-tufts; the formation of their bills was also very singular. We saw them fishing for shrimps and other small creatures along the edges of the water.
Among the water birds are the pelican, the muscovy, and black duck; the spoon-bill, plover, curlew, teal, darter; while herons, ibises, and cranes, are found in great numbers on the shores of the lagoons and rivers.
Again, the barbs of the feathers in various widely-distinct birds are filamentous or plumose, as with some herons, ibises, birds of paradise, and Gallinaceae. Smaller feathers when thus denuded appear like bristles, as on the breast of the turkey-cock.
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