Roc

The rukh was the giant bird of sailors' talk on the Indian Ocean routes. Sinbad's second voyage in the Thousand and One Nights gives the classic account: marooned on an empty island, he sights a white dome in the distance, paces off its circumference at fifty steps, and finds no door — it is a roc's egg. The sky darkens as the parent bird settles over it; Sinbad unwinds his turban and lashes himself to its leg, and at dawn is carried to a valley walled with cliffs, floored with diamonds and serpents. On the fifth voyage his shipmates crack open a roc egg and eat the chick, and the parent birds sink the ship with boulders the size of millstones dropped from the sky.

The bird was not pure fancy. Marco Polo reports that in the seas south of Madagascar lives a bird called the ruc, like an eagle grown beyond measure, which seizes elephants, carries them aloft and drops them to feed on the carcass; he adds that the Great Khan sent envoys to inquire and received a gigantic feather. Modern scholars connect the legend to Madagascar's elephant bird, a flightless giant three metres tall, extinct by the seventeenth century at the latest, whose eggs — nearly a metre around — reached Arab merchants as curiosities.

In the texts the roc blurs into the Persian simurgh and the Arabian anqa. Through European translations of the Nights, 'roc' became the West's standard name for any impossible bird, migrating from natural histories into the bestiaries of modern fantasy games.