The Story Of The Phoenix

The Phoenix is a wonderful bird, which is found in Hindustan. It has no mate, but dwells alone in solitude. Its beak is wonderful hard and long, like a flute, containing holes to the number of nearly a hundred. Each of these holes gives forth a different tone, and each tone reveals a different mystery. The art of music was taught to this bird by a philosopher who became its friend, and when the Phoenix utters these sounds, bird and fish are agitated thereby: all the wild beasts are reduced to silence, and by that entrancing music are bereft of their senses.

The Phoenix lives about a thousand years; it knows quite clearly the time of its death, and when this knowledge is tearing at its heart, it gathers fuel, a hundred trees or more, and heaps them up in one place. It hastens to place itself in the midst of pyre, and utters a hundred laments over itself. Then through each of those holes in its beak, out of the depths of its spotless soul, it gives forth plaintive cries of woe, and as it utters its dying lament, it trembles like a leaf. At the sound of its music, all the birds of the air gather together, and the wild beast came, attracted by the sound, and all assemble to be present at the death of the Phoenix, knowing that they must die like it. When the moment has come to draw its last breath, the Phoenix spreads out its tail and its feathers, and thereby fire is kindles and the flames spread swiftly to the heaped-up wood, and it blazes up with vigour. Soon both pyre and bird become a glowing red-hot mass. When the glowing charcoal is reduced to ashes, and but one spark remains, then, from the ashes, a nex Phoenix arises into life.