Читать книгу Those Other Animals - G. A. Henty - Страница 7

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LIKE the dodo, the moa, and the great auk, the dragon is admittedly an extinct animal, but that is no reason why his characteristics should not be considered in these pages. The question that has long agitated scientific men is, first, as to the extent to which the personal peculiarities of the dragon have been exaggerated by popular tradition, and in the second place as to the period at which he became extinct. There have been those who have even asserted that his existence was purely apocryphal, but with men so mentally constituted argument is useless. The traditions of almost all nations point to the fact that not only did the dragon exist as a race, but that individual dragons continued to exist down to comparatively modern times. We may set aside at once the dragon of Wantley. Cæsar makes no allusion to dragons existing in Great Britain; Wantley did not exist before Cæsar’s time; therefore there can have been no dragon at Wantley. But it is not possible so summarily to dispose of all legends, and it is remarkable that the dragon should figure with almost precisely the same characteristics in the folk lore of both Western and Oriental peoples. Our most valuable national coin bears its portrait, and it is the national emblem both of China and Japan. St. George, as we know, was a warlike saint of Cappadocia; although his feats and adventures are somewhat doubtful and misty as to locality, it may be assumed that the dragon who succumbed to his prowess was a native of Asia.

The dragon is, in fact, an exceedingly interesting problem, and the balance of probability appears to be wholly in favour of his existence. We know that great winged saurians inhabited the earth in prehistoric times, and such a creature would be likely to survive cataclysms which overwhelmed the greater portion of his contemporaries. Water would not seriously inconvenience him. His habits would on the whole be retiring, and until man multiplied and became thick over the world, there would be but small inclination to interfere with him. The saurians attain to extreme longevity, and if only a few specimens escaped at the time of the flood, their descendants of a very few generations would have existed in comparatively modern times. The Chinese legends point to the preservation of the dragon in this manner. They say that at a time which closely approximates to that generally assigned to Noah’s deluge, great floods extended almost to the boundaries of China, and that it was at that time that the dragons first made their appearance and became a serious scourge in some of the frontier provinces. Doubtless the European traditions connected with the dragons were brought by the tribes which wave after wave poured in from Central Asia, and it must be assumed that there, if anywhere, the survivors from the flood for some time flourished.

It is certainly difficult to assume that the descriptions of these creatures by so many peoples and such diverse sources would be all but identical, had they been purely the work of imagination and not drawn from a living model. All accounts unite in describing the dragon as a creature clothed with scales, possessing a flexible neck like that of the plesiosaurus, a large head, with jaws well furnished with pointed teeth like the crocodile’s, a flexible tail like the lizard’s, and wings like a pterodactyl’s. The flying apparatus of these extinct creatures, indeed, closely resembled that of a bat, being a membrane from the vastly extended finger of the fore leg to that of the hind leg. This does not agree with the popular idea of the dragon, but the ancients were not close observers, and it was quite enough for them to know that their gigantic enemy was furnished with wings, without inquiring closely into their arrangement. It does not appear that the dragon was able to fly, but it would rather seem that when he ran to attack an enemy he aided himself by flapping his wings, as a swan often travels along the surface of the water before it fairly takes to flight. Some of the dragons are depicted as altogether devoid of wings, the Imperial Japanese dragon showing no signs of such appendages. Thus both the Chinese and Japanese legends go far to prove that several species of saurians survived for some time the general disappearance of their prehistoric congeners. The legendary dragons differ but slightly from some of the prehistoric reptiles, and as the Orientals were entirely in ignorance of the former existence or appearance of these creatures, it is difficult in the extreme to believe that they could have coined from their own imagination a creature so closely resembling them.

In one respect only we must admit an error, and a serious one. Most of the legendary dragons possessed stings at the tip of their tail. We give up the stings, but at the same time would urge that this error cannot be considered as destructive of the truth of the legend. In the present day it is popularly believed by the vulgar that the larva known as the Devil’s Coach Horse—a creature which when alarmed carries its tail in a threatening manner over its head—is, like the scorpion, armed with a sting. In some countries, too, it is believed that dragon-flies are similarly armed. If, then, such errors can exist in an age of general enlightenment, it may well be that in older times the dragon, a creature certainly rare as well as very terrible, was by the popular fancy endowed with means of defence even more formidable than those he possessed. The breath of the creature is in all legends relating to it described as fœtid and poisonous. And as undoubtedly snakes exhale a fœtid odour, there is nothing improbable in the assertion that the dragons also did so.

No details whatever have come down to us as to the domestic habits of the dragon. We only know that he desolated whole provinces, and that the only method of preserving the community from his attacks was the appeasement of his appetite by the offering of victims. These victims are generally represented as being young females, but it is not probable that the dragon himself was particular on this score. Women would be chosen for the tribute, partly because it was supposed that their tender flesh would be more gratefully received than that of tougher victims; but much more because women were in those days considered of smaller account than men, and could be pounced upon and handed over to the monster with much less fuss and trouble than would have been the case had fighting men been chosen. Women’s rights in those days were much less perfectly understood than at present; and the question of the equality of the sexes had not so much as occurred even to the most speculative philosophers. The origin of the story of the female tribute evidently is, that the dragon was too formidable a creature to be assailed, and that it was deemed sound policy to keep him in a state of lethargy in the cave in which he dwelt by supplying him with an occasional victim, rather than that he should sally out and make his own selection. The whole story would seem to show that the dragon was, like most saurians, content to pass a tranquil existence unless when disturbed; that, like the rest of the race, he was capable of prolonged fasts; and that, huge as was his bulk, a meal once a month or so sufficed for his needs. The dragon was said to roar, and this again is another confirmation of the truth of the legend, for the crocodile when enraged can bellow like a bull, and this would naturally be the sound that a great saurian would utter. Upon the whole, it is evident that the balance of probability inclines heavily towards the reality of the existence of the dragon up to comparatively modern times; and we may still cling to the belief that the national legend of the victory of St. George over the dragon is not wholly apocryphal, but possesses a large substratum of truth.