Part 25 (2/2)
[Footnote 3: Dabois elegans, _Grey_.]
[Footnote 4: Naja tripadians, _Gunther_.]
[Footnote 5: Trigonocephalus hypnale, _Wegl_.]
_Cobra de Capello_.--The cobra de capello is the only one exhibited by the itinerant snake-charmers: and the accuracy of Davy's conjecture, that they control it, not by extracting its fangs, but by courageously availing themselves of its accustomed timidity and extreme reluctance to use its fatal weapons, received a painful confirmation during my residence in Ceylon, by the death of one of these performers, whom his audience had provoked to attempt some unaccustomed familiarity with the cobra; it bit him on the wrist, and he expired the same evening. The hill near Kandy, on which the official residences of the Governor and Colonial Secretary had been built, is covered in many places with the deserted nests of the white ants (_termites_), and these are the favourite retreats of the sluggish and spiritless cobra, which watches from their apertures the toads and lizards on which it preys. Here, when I have repeatedly come upon them, their only impulse was concealment; and on one occasion, when a cobra of considerable length could not escape sufficiently quickly, owing to the bank being nearly precipitous on both sides of the road, a few blows from my whip were sufficient to deprive it of life. There is a rare variety which the natives fancifully designate the ”king of the cobras;” it has the head and the anterior half of the body of so light a colour, that at a distance it seems like a silvery white.[1] A gentleman who held a civil appointment at Kornegalle, had a servant who was bitten by a snake, and he informed me that on enlarging a hole near the foot of the tree under which the accident occurred, he unearthed a cobra of upwards of three feet long, and so purely white as to induce him to believe that it was an albino.
With the exception of the rat-snake[2], the cobra de capello is the only serpent which seems from choice to frequent the vicinity of human dwellings, but it is doubtless attracted by the young of the domestic fowl and by the moisture of the wells and drainage. The Singhalese remark that if one cobra be destroyed near a house, its companion is almost certain to be discovered immediately after,--a popular belief which I had an opportunity of verifying on more than one occasion. Once, when a snake of this description was killed in a bath of Government House at Colombo, its mate was found in the same spot the day after; and again, at my own stables, a cobra of five feet long, having fallen into the well, which was too deep to permit its escape, its companion of the same size was found the same morning in an adjoining drain.[3] On this occasion the snake, which had been several hours in the well, swam with ease, raising its head and hood above water; and instances have repeatedly occurred of the cobra de capello voluntarily taking considerable excursions by sea. When the ”Wellington,” a government vessel employed in the conservancy of the pearl banks, was anch.o.r.ed about a quarter of a mile from land, in the bay of Koodremale, a cobra was seen, about an hour before sunset, swimming vigorously towards the s.h.i.+p. It came within twelve yards, when the sailors a.s.sailed it with billets of wood and other missiles, and forced it to return to land. The following morning they discovered the track which it had left on the sh.o.r.e, and traced it along the sand till it disappeared in the jungle.[4] On a later occasion, in the vicinity of the same spot, when the ”Wellington” was lying at some distance from the sh.o.r.e, a cobra was found and killed on board, where it could only have gained access by climbing up the cable. It was first discovered by a sailor, who felt the chill as it glided over his foot.[5]
[Footnote 1: A Singhalese work, the _Sarpa Doata_, quoted in the _Ceylon Times_, January, 1857, enumerates four species of the cobra;--the _raja_, or king; the _velyander_, or trader; the _baboona_, or hermit; and the _goore_, or agriculturist. The young cobras, it says, are not venomous till after the thirteenth day, when they shed their coat for the first time.]
[Footnote 2: Coryphodon Blumenbachii. WOLF, in his interesting story of his _Life and Adventures in Ceylon_, mentions that rat-snakes were often so domesticated by the natives as to feed at their table. He says: ”I once saw an example of this in the house of a native. It being meal time, he called his snake, which immediately came forth from the roof under which he and I were sitting. He gave it victuals from his own dish, which the snake took of itself from off a fig-leaf that was laid for it, and ate along with its host. When it had eaten its fill, he gave it a kiss and bade it go to its hole.”
Since the above was written, Major Skinner, writing to me 12th Dec.
1858, mentions the still more remarkable case of the domestication of the cobra de capello in Ceylon. ”Did you ever hear,” he says, ”of tame cobras being kept and domesticated about a house, going in and out at pleasure, and in common with the rest of the inmates? In one family, near Negombo, cobras are kept as protectors, in the place of dogs, by a wealthy man who has always large sums of money in his house. But this is not a solitary case of the kind. I heard of it only the other day, but from undoubtedly good authority. The snakes glide about the house, a terror to thieves, but never attempting to harm the inmates.”]
[Footnote 3: PLINY notices the affection that subsists between the male and female asp; and that if one of them happens to be killed, the other seeks to avenge its death.--Lib. viii. c. 37.]
[Footnote 4: STEWART'S _Account of the Pearl Fisheries of Ceylon_, p. 9: Colombo, 1843.
The Python reticulatus (the ”rock-snake”) has been known like the cobra de capello, to make short voyages at sea. One was taken on board H.M.S.
”Hastings,” when off the coast of Burmah, in 1853; it is now in the possession of the surgeon, Dr. Scott.]
[Footnote 5: SWAINSON, in his _Habits and Instincts of Animals_, c. iv.
p. 187, says that instances are well attested of the common English snake having been met with in the open channel; between the coast of Wales and the island of Anglesea, as if they had taken their departure from the one and were bound for the other.]
In BENNETT'S account of ”_Ceylon and its Capabilities_” there is a curious piece of Singhalese folk-lore, to the effect, that the cobra de capello every time it expends its poison _loses a joint of its tail_, and eventually acquires a head which resembles that of a toad. A recent discovery of Dr. Kelaart has thrown light on the origin of this popular fallacy. The family of ”false snakes” (_pseudo-typhlops_), as Schlegel names the group, have till lately consisted of but three species, one only of which was known to inhabit Ceylon. They belong to a family intermediate between the lizards and serpents with the body of the latter, and the head of the former, with which they are moreover identified by having the upper jaw fixed to the skull as in mammals and birds, instead of movable as amongst the true ophidians. In this they resemble the amphisbaenidae; but the tribe of _Uropeltidae_, or ”rough tails,” has the further peculiarity, that the tail is truncated, instead of ending, like that of the typhlops, in a point more or less acute; and the reptile a.s.sists its own movements by pressing the flat end to the ground. Within a very recent period an important addition has been made to this genus, by the discovery of five new species in Ceylon; in some of which the singular construction of the tail is developed to an extent much more marked than in any previously existing specimen. One of these, the _Uropeltis grandis_ of Kelaart, is distinguished by its dark brown colour, shot with a bluish metallic l.u.s.tre, closely approaching the ordinary shade of the cobra; and the tail is abruptly and flatly compressed as though it had been severed by a knife. The form of this singular reptile will be best understood by a reference to the accompanying figure; and there can be, I think, little doubt that to its strange and anomalous structure is to be traced the fable of the transformation of the cobra de capello. The colour alone would seem to identify the two reptiles, but the head and mouth are no longer those of a serpent, and the disappearance of the tail might readily suggest the mutilation which the tradition a.s.serts.
[Ill.u.s.tration: UROPELTIS GRANDIS]
The Singhalese Buddhists, in their religious abstinence from inflicting death on any creature, are accustomed, after securing a venomous snake, to enclose it in a basket of woven palm leaves, and to set it afloat on a river. During my residence in Ceylon, I never heard of the death of a European which was caused by the bite of a snake; and in the returns of coroners' inquests which were made officially to my department, such accidents to the natives appear chiefly to have happened at night, when the animal having been surprised or trodden on, had inflicted the wound in self-defence.[1] For these reasons the Singhalese, when obliged to leave their houses in the dark, carry a stick with a loose ring, the noise[2] of which as they strike it on the ground is sufficient to warn the snakes to leave their path.
[Footnote 1: In a return of 112 coroners' inquests, in cases of death from wild animals, held in Ceylon in five years, from 1851 to 1855 inclusive, 68 are ascribed to the bites of serpents; and in almost every instance the a.s.sault is set down as having taken place _at night_. The majority of the sufferers were children and women.]
[Footnote 2: PLINY notices that the serpent has the sense of hearing more acute than that of sight; and that it is more frequently put in motion by the sound of footsteps than by the appearance of the intruder, ”excitatur pede saepius.”--Lib. viii. c. 36.]
_The Python_.--The great python[1] (the ”boa,” as it is commonly designated by Europeans, the ”anaconda” of Eastern story), which is supposed to crush the bones of an elephant, and to swallow the tiger, is found, though not of so portentous dimensions, in the cinnamon gardens within a mile of the fort of Colombo, where it feeds on hog-deer and other smaller animals.
[Footnote 1: Python reticulatus, _Gray_.]
The natives occasionally take it alive, and securing it to a pole expose it for sale as a curiosity. One which was brought to me in this way measured seventeen feet with a proportionate thickness: but another which crossed my path on a coffee estate on the Peac.o.c.k Mountain at Pusilawa, considerably exceeded these dimensions. Another which I watched in the garden at Elie House, near Colombo, surprised me by the ease with which it erected itself almost perpendicularly in order to scale a wall upwards of ten feet high.
Of ten species which ascend the trees to search for squirrels and lizards, and to rifle the nests of birds, one half, including the green _carawilla_, and the deadly _tic polonga_, are believed by the natives to be venomous; but the fact is very dubious. I have heard of the cobra being found on the crown of a coco-nut palm, attracted, it was said, by the toddy which was flowing at the time, as it was the season for drawing it.
_Water-Snakes_.--The fresh-water snakes, of which four species have been described as inhabiting the still water and pools, are all harmless in Ceylon. A gentleman, who found near a river an agglutinated cl.u.s.ter of the eggs of one variety _(Tropidonotus umbratus)_, placed them under a gla.s.s shade on his drawing-room table, where one by one the young serpents emerged from the sh.e.l.l to the number of twenty.
The use of the Pamboo-Kaloo, or snake-stone, as a remedy in cases of wounds by venomous serpents, has probably been communicated to the Singhalese by the itinerant snake-charmers who resort to the island from the coast of Coromandel; and more than one well-authenticated instance of its successful application has been told to me by persons who had been eye-witnesses to what they described. On one occasion, in March, 1854, a friend of mine was riding, with some other civil officers of the government, along a jungle path in the vicinity of Bintenne, when they saw one of two Tamils, who were approaching them, suddenly dart into the forest and return, holding in both hands a cobra de capello which he had seized by the head and tail. He called to his companion for a.s.sistance to place it in their covered basket, but, in doing this, he handled it so inexpertly that it seized him by the finger, and retained its hold for a few seconds, as if unable to retract its fangs. The blood flowed, and intense pain appeared to follow almost immediately; but, with all expedition, the friend of the sufferer undid his waistcloth, and took from it two snake-stones, each of the size of a small almond, intensely black and highly polished, though of an extremely light substance. These he applied one to each wound inflicted by the teeth of the serpent, to which the stones attached themselves closely, the blood that oozed from the bites being rapidly imbibed by the porous texture of the article applied. The stones adhered tenaciously for three or four minutes, the wounded man's companion in the meanwhile rubbing his arm downwards from the shoulder towards the fingers. At length the snake-stones dropped off of their own accord; the suffering of the man appeared to have subsided; he twisted his fingers till the joints cracked, and went on his way without concern. Whilst this had been going on, another Indian of the party who had come up took from his bag a small piece of white wood, which resembled a root, and pa.s.sed it gently near the head of the cobra, which the latter immediately inclined close to the ground; he then lifted the snake without hesitation, and coiled it into a circle at the bottom of his basket. The root by which he professed to be enabled to perform this operation with safety he called the _Naya-thalee Kalinga_ (the root of the snake-plant), protected by which he professed his ability to approach any reptile with impunity.
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