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 Miniature by Mikho Mosulishvili

Translated from Georgian  into  English by Ann Mosulishvili

From book ”Wildlife of The Islands’  by William Hopkins Amos 

Albatross with black back (Diomedea immutabilis) lives on Hawaii islands. He flies over the endless spaces of the ocean. During ten fortnights the albatross is on his way from Seattle ( Washington ) to his homeland – a small island Midway. The distance from Seattle to      Midway is 5 100 km. Moreover, the albatross flies from the Philippines to Midway during twelve fortnights, he covers over 6 400 km and reaches his target…  

How he flies so long, how he find his way home is still a big mystery for the scientist-ornithologists.

I wanted to find out more about these phenomenon so I already can’t remember which day it is that I am still sitting in the national library and looking through illustrated ornithological books…  On one page I see a picture of a  huge turtle with a long-beak wild bird on his test: William Hopkins Amos – Wildlife of The Islands (Wildlife habitat series); A Chanticleer Press Edition. Publishing in 1980 by Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated, New York . The name of this book is “wildlife of the islands.” As I found out scientist-biologist William Amos and his team had traveled around almost all islands on the earth and had described the different eco-systems. I kept looking through the pictures of  seals, penguins, colonies, monkeys, parrots…      I skipped some pages as I wanted to reach the albatross pages as fast as possible. And here’s what I saw… A large hilly place covered with light violet irreproachable snow. Above it only colorful sky. It seemed to me it was dawn as the colors had already started their game… I could not find anything alive on that page and I was just about to think that even foreigners are sometimes mistaken that I noticed that the picture was continued on the next page. On the next page I saw the small hills again but I Could also clearly see two swans with black and yellow beaks. Suddenly, everything was clear, the small hills all over the places were the swans under snow. These were long-necked swans laying under the snow with their heads and with beaks under their wings.   It seemed that they had been flaying and hard snowfall had started. So they had to land here and lay close to each other…

The swans did not have to sing their famous last song, which they usually perform before death. Not this time, because they were not dead. Like these two swans the others will also come out of snow, shake their bodies and fly away…

The writing under this picture on the previous page: Whooper swans huddle together for warmth during a snow storm on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido . The swans breed in Siberia and winter in Japan . Half of the 13,000 winter visitors stay on Hokkaido , while the rest go to islands farther south.

“The swan of Avon ” this is how William Shakespeare was called by his contemporaries. 

May be the writers who are yet to be read by us – William Shakespeare, François Rabelais, Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, Shota Rustaveli, Miguel de Cervantes or the others – are hidden in white pages just like these swans and are waiting for us as the swans for the dawn to fly along our lives?