Over
this building they hung all day in a crowd, rising high to
come down again at a frantic speed, and at each descent a few
birds could be seen to enter the holes, while others rushed
out to join the throng, and then all rose and came down again
and swept round and round in a furious chase, shrieking as if
mad. At all hours they drew me to that spot, and standing
there, marvelling at their swaying power and the fury that
possessed them, they appeared to me like tormented beings, and
were like those doomed wretches in the halls of Eblis whose
hearts were in a blaze of unquenchable fire, and who, every
one with hands pressed to his breast, went spinning round in
an everlasting agonized dance. They were tormented and crazed
by the two most powerful instincts of birds pulling in
opposite directions--the parental instinct and the passion of
migration which called them to the south.
In such weather, especially on that naked desolate coast,
exposed to the fury of the winds, one marvels at our modern
craze for the sea; not merely to come and gaze upon and listen
to it, to renew our youth in its salt, exhilarating waters and
to lie in delicious idleness on the warm shingle or mossy
cliff; but to be always, for days and weeks and even for
months, at all hours, in all weathers, close to it, with its
murmur, "as of one in pain," for ever in our ears.
Undoubtedly it is an unnatural, a diseased, want in us, the
result of a life too confined and artificial in close dirty
overcrowded cities.
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