One winter afternoon ten or fifteen years ago, I sat drinking mint tea opposite the mortuary temple of Ramsis III at Medinet Habu. A pair of hoopoes strutted round my feet, thrusting their long curved beaks into dry ground sparsely flecked with grass. One paused now and then, looked up and momentarily raised its Mohawk crest. The other stabbed so repeatedly and with such force that, stupidly, I feared it might strike a hidden stone and break its bill.
*
After my father died, my mother moved to a small town where she knew no one, so she joined the horticultural society and the film club and volunteered at the local museum. There, she was assigned to the bird room, home to several hundred stuffed birds collected by a local ornithologist a hundred years before. Every Thursday she dusted, cleaned and polished the vitrines and, when I visited, I helped her. One highlight of the collection was a white-tailed eagle, shot in the neighbourhood in 1889, a contribution to that species’ imminent extinction in the British Isles. Another was a hoopoe, not resident even in the far south of England, but sometimes a European bird returning from its African migration overshoots, as this one must have done.
My memory of that hoopoe bears little resemblance to the striking cinnamon, black and white birds I know so well after years in Egypt: it’s smaller, indeterminate in colour, a bit motheaten perhaps. But I wonder: if I visited the bird room now, would I find the hoopoe quite so drab? Would my view of it be coloured, quite literally, by familiarity with the living bird? Or has my memory faded more in these short years than its plumage did in a hundred?
*
After a steep climb, we arrived at the rim of a shallow depression and set off across the grass in search of a place to camp.
‘Listen.’ Jean-Pierre held up his hand. ‘A hoopoe.’
The cry seemed to come from the mountainside some way ahead. After so many years, I have no memory of the call itself; in those days, I’d never even seen a hoopoe, much less knowingly heard its call. Was it the ‘hoo – hoo – hoo’ that’s become so familiar and that I now know is made only by the male?
In the course of those treks, Jean-Pierre told us a great deal about the Moroccan Berbers and the environment in which they live. One afternoon when Jean-Pierre had been holding forth and M’barek, his fellow guide, and the camel drivers had been laughing to one side, M’barek told me that much of what Jean-Pierre said was rubbish; at best, half-understood. He may have been wrong about the hoopoe too; perhaps it was a different bird, or even a human call.
But it occurs to me now that I, too, am mistaken; that I never climbed to that elevated bowl with Jean-Pierre and M’barek, but was there one summer when I walked for weeks in the High Atlas with a different guide. So it must have been Bassou who drew my attention to the hoopoe, and the people I remember listening with me – Loule, Denis, M’barek – weren’t there at all.
Patricia Newbery’s work (fiction, nonfiction and poetry) has appeared in The Cafe Irreal, The Cincinnati Review, The Citron Review and elsewhere. She’s a British/Irish translator and editor, and has lived in Egypt for many years.