Look up, into the brightness,--into the violet blaze!--behold him hovering in the splendor of heaven, sailing before the sun, that Kharkas, 'dwelling in decay,'--whom the Parsee reveres. (For't is written that even the flitting of his shadow over the faces of the dead driveth out the unclean spirit that entereth into corpses.) 'From the height of his highest flight he discerneth if there be upon the ground a morsel of flesh not bigger than a hand; and for his comfort the odor of musk hath been created underneath his wing,'--How magnificent his soaring!--yet the vast pinions never beat; they veer only with his wheeling,--sometimes presenting to the meridian their whole black banner-breadth,--sometimes offering only the sabre-curves of their edges. He seems to float by volition alone,--to swim the deeps of day without effort. Higher and higher he mounts into the abyss of light; now he seems to hang beside the sun!--now he is only a whirling speck!--now he is gone!--My field-glass brings him again into view for a moment--sailing, circling, spiring by turns; but once more he dwindles into a mote, not bigger than a tiny flake of soot, which rises up, up, up, and vanishes away at last into luminous eternities unfathomable. Yet from those invisible heights his eye still scans the face of the land and the features of men--that wondrous eye far reaching as a beam of daylight. 'There is a path,' saith Job, 'which no fowl knoweth, _and which the eye of the vulture hath not seen_--But that path lies not open to the gaze of the sun; for whatsoever earthly thing the day-star hath looked upon, that thing the ken of the vulture also hath discerned. Rightly, therefore, hath the eye of the vulture been mythologically likened unto the eye of deities and of demons. Was not the sacred symbol of Isis, the Impenetrably Veiled,--Isis, mother of Gods, 'Eye of the Sun,' who by the quivering of her feathers createth light, who by the beating of her wings createth spirit,--a Golden Vulture, the saving emblem hung about the throat of the dead? And the vultures of the Vedic prayer to Indra, all-seeing demons; great sun-vultures of the Sanscrit epic, demi-gods. By vision alone it was given the bird Gatayus to know the past, the present, and that which was to come; for, encompassing the world in his flight, all things were discerned by his gaze.