Note 146 — V. HERE FOLLOWETH CONCERNING INDIA THE GREATER.

“Ut ego audivi.” Ambiguum est, an ipse episcopus D⸺m loquentem audivisset? Not many years ago, an eccentric gentleman wrote from Sikkim to the secretary of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, stating that, on the snows of the mountains there, were found certain mysterious footsteps, more than thirty or forty paces asunder, which the natives alleged to be Shaitan’s. The writer at the same time offered, if Government would give him leave of absence for a certain period, etc., to go and trace the author of these mysterious vestiges, and thus this strange creature would be discovered without any expense to Government. The notion of catching Shaitan without any expense to Government was a sublime piece of Anglo-Indian tact, but the offer was not accepted. Our author had, however, in view probably the strange cry of the Devil-bird, as it is called in Ceylon. “The Singhalese regard it literally with horror, and its scream by night in the vicinity of a village is bewailed as the harbinger of impending calamity.” “Its ordinary note is a magnificent clear shout, like that of a human being, and which can be heard at a great distance, and has a fine effect in the silence of the closing night. It has another cry like that of a hen just caught; but the sounds which have earned for it its bad name, and which I have heard but once to perfection, are indescribable, the most appalling that can be imagined, and scarcely to be heard without shuddering; I can only compare it to a boy in torture, whose screams are stopped by being strangled.” Mr. Mitford, from whom Sir E. Tennent quotes the last passage, considers it to be a Podargus or night-hawk, rather than the brown owl as others have supposed. (Tennent’s Nat. Hist. of Ceylon, 246-8.)