Note on mounting giant birds

Note: this text is extracted from Book V, chapter 26:

“Thinking thus, Śaktideva slowly advanced and hid himself among the back-feathers of that bird while it was asleep, and next morning, when the other birds went off in different directions, that vulture, exhibiting a strange partiality to the Brāhman like destiny, carrying Śaktideva on his back where he had climbed up, went immediately to the Golden City to feed again. Then the bird alighted in a garden, and Śaktideva got down from its back unobserved and left it, but while he was roaming about there he saw two women engaged in gathering flowers...”.

So in the Swedish tale, “The Beautiful Palace East of the Sun and North of the Earth,” the phænix carries the youth on his back to the palace. Cf the halcyon in Lucian’s Vera Historia, Book II, 40 (see Fowler’s translation, Oxford, 1905, vol. ii, p. 169), whose nest is seven miles in circumference, and whose egg is probably the prototype of that in the Arabian Nights. Cf. also the Glücksvogel in Prym and Socin, Syrische Märchen, p. 269, and the eagle which carries Chaucer in The House of Fame.

—In the Kathākoça (Tawney, pp. 29, 30) the hero Nāgadatta climbs up a banyan-tree and sounds gongs in order to scare away enormous bhāruṇḍa birds, who, by the wind produced by the flapping of their wings, cause a stranded ship to continue on its course. In the same collection of Jain stories (pp. 164, 165) Lalitāṅga, having overheard a valuable secret from the conversation of two birds, crawled in among the feathers of one of the birds and lay there.

“At the hour of dawn they all went to the city of Champā. Lalitāṅga crept out of the bird’s feathers, and entered the city.”

Our old friend Sindbad makes similar use of the rukh when stranded on a desert island. The great bird suddenly alighted on a great white dome, its egg

“and brooded over it with its wings covering it and its legs stretched out behind it on the ground, and in this posture it fell asleep, glory be to Him who sleepeth not! When I saw this, I arose and, unwinding my turband from my head, doubled it and twisted it into a rope, with which I girt my middle and bound my waist fast to the legs of the rukh, saying in myself:

‘Peradventure, this bird may carry me to a land of cities and inhabitants, and that will be better than abiding in this desert island’”

(Nighis, Burton, vol. vi, p. 17).

I have already given (Vol. I, pp. 103-105) full references to the Garuḍa bird, rukh, etc. —n.m.p.