“the Rukh.”  If it sees us, it will send us to destruction.’  It was then some 10 miles from the junk.  But God Almighty was gracious unto us, and sent us a fair wind, which turned us from the direction in which the Rukh was; so we did not see him well enough to take cognizance of his real shape.”  In this story we have evidently a case of abnormal refraction, causing an island to appear suspended in the air.[6]

The Archipelago was perhaps the legitimate habitat of the Rukh, before circumstances localised it in the direction of Madagascar.  In the Indian Sea, says Kazwini, is a bird of size so vast that when it is dead men take the half of its bill and make a ship of it!  And there too Pigafetta heard of this bird, under its Hindu name of Garuda, so big that it could fly away with an elephant.[7] Kazwini also says that the ’Angka carries off an elephant as a hawk flies off with a mouse; his flight is like the loud thunder.  Whilom he dwelt near the haunts of men, and wrought them great mischief.  But once on a time it had carried off a bride in her bridal array, and Hamd Allah, the Prophet of those days, invoked a curse upon the bird.  Wherefore the Lord banished it to an inaccessible Island in the Encircling Ocean.

The Simurgh or ’Angka, dwelling behind veils of Light and Darkness on the inaccessible summits of Caucasus, is in Persian mysticism an emblem of the Almighty.

In Northern Siberia the people have a firm belief in the former existence of birds of colossal size, suggested apparently by the fossil bones of great pachyderms which are so abundant there.  And the compressed sabre-like horns of Rhinoceros tichorinus are constantly called, even by Russian merchants, birds’ claws.  Some of the native tribes fancy the vaulted skull of the same rhinoceros to be the bird’s head, and the leg-bones of other pachyderms to be its quills; and they relate that their forefathers used to fight wonderful battles with this bird.  Erman ingeniously suggests that the Herodotean story of the Gryphons, from under which the Arimaspians drew their gold, grew out of the legends about these fossils.

I may add that the name of our rook in chess is taken from that of this same bird; though first perverted from (Sansk.) rath, a chariot.

Some Eastern authors make the Rukh an enormous beast instead of a bird.  (See J.R.A.S. XIII. 64, and Elliot, II. 203.) A Spanish author of the 16th century seems to take the same view of the Gryphon, but he is prudently vague in describing it, which he does among the animals of Africa:  “The Grifo which some call CAMELLO PARDAL ... is called by the Arabs Yfrit(!), and is made just in that fashion in which we see it painted in pictures.” (Marmol, Descripcion General de Africa, Granada, 1573, I. f. 30.) The Zorafa is described as a different beast, which it certainly is!