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The summer months [of 1939] succeeded each other all too fast and the evil omens multiplied; the storks that gathered from every roof and chimney to join the ragged south-bound armada were leaving a doomed Europe. To forget and to exorcize for a day the growing assembly of trouble, we set off, on the second day of September, for a mushroom-gathering picnic in a wood about ten miles away, some in an old open carriage, some on horseback; through the sunlit vineyards where the grapes were almost ready to be harvested and pressed, and out into the open country. The clearings in the wood, when we arrived, were studded with our quarry. Alighting and dismounting, we scattered in a competitive frenzy, reassembling soon with our baskets full to the brim. In the glade of this mysterious wood, with the tethered horses grazing and swishing their tails under the oak branches, the picnic spun itself out. Soon it was late in the afternoon and the great demijohn was empty and the old Polish coachman was fidgeting the horses back into the shafts and fastening the traces. The ones on horseback set off by a different way, racing each other across the mown slopes of the vast hayfields and galloping in noisy and wine-sprung zigzags through the ricks and down a wide valley and up again through another oak-spinney to the road where the carriage, trailing a long plume of dust, was trotting more sedately home. We reined in and fell into a walk alongside.
The track followed the crest of a high ridge with the dales of Moldavia flowing away on either hand. We were moving through illimitable sweeps of still air. Touched with pink on their under sides by the declining sun, which also combed the tall stubble with gold, one or two thin shoals of mackerel cloud hung motionless in the enormous sky. Whale-shaped shadows expanded along the valleys below, and the spinneys were sending long loops of shade downhill. The air was so still that the smoke from Matila Ghyka's cigar hung in a riband in the wake of our cavalcade; and how clearly the bells of the flocks, which were streaming down in haloes of golden dust to the wells and the brushwood folds a few ravines away, floated to our ears. Homing peasants waved their hats in greeting, and someone out of sight was singing one of those beautiful and rather forlorn country songs they call a doina. A blurred line along the sky a league away marked the itinerary of the deserting storks. Those in the carriage below were snowed under by picnic things, mushroom baskets and bunches of anemones picked in the wood. It was a moment of peace and tranquillity and we rode on in silence towards the still far-off samovar and the oil lamps and heaven knew what bad news. The silence was suddenly broken by an eager exclamation from Matila.
"Oh, look!" he cried. One hand steadied the basket of mushrooms on his lap, the other pointed at the sky into which he was peering. High overhead some water-birds, astray from the delta, perhaps, or some near-by fen, were flying in a phalanx. (I shall have to improvise names and details here, for precise memory and ornithological knowledge both fail me. But the gist and the spirit are exact.)
"Yes," he said, "it's rather rare; the xiphorhyncus paludinensis minor, the glaivionette, or Lesser Swamp Swordbill -- Wendischer Schwertvogel in German, glodnic in Moldavian dialect; I believe the Wallachians call it spadunã de baltã. Varieties are dotted about all over the world but always in very small numbers. They live in floating nests and have a very shrill ascending note in the mating season." He whistled softly once or twice. "Their eggs are a ravishing colour, a lovely lapis lazuli with little primrose speckles. They have been identified with the Stymphalian birds that Hercules killed, and there's a mention of them in Lucian's Dialogues and in Pliny the Elder, and, I think in Oppian... The ancient Nubians revered them as minor gods and there's supposed to be one on a bas-relief at Cyrene; there's certainly a flight of them in the background of a Journey of the Magi by Sassetta -- he probably saw them in the reeds of Lake Trasimene, where they still breed; and the chiefs of two tribes on the Zambezi wear robes of their tail feathers for the new moon ceremonies. Some people," he continued, with a slight change of key, "find them too fishy. It's not true, as I learnt years ago, near Bordeaux. On a spit, over a very slow fire -- of hornbeam twigs, if possible -- with frequent basting and plenty of saffron, glaivionette à la landaise can be delicious... Alas: I've only eaten it once..."
His dark eyes, a-kindle with memory, watched the birds out of sight across the dying sky, and we all burst out laughing. The cosmic approach... it had been a happy day, as we had hoped, and it had to last us for a long time, for the next day's news scattered this little society for ever.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
