Concerning Animals and Other Matters, Edward Hamilton Aitken [reading the story of the .txt] 📗

of ten, accompany him, carrying similar baskets, or capacious wallets, or long, cylindrical drums, on which they play with their fingers. The dramatic effect of the whole is enhanced when one of them allows a huge python, a snake of the _Boa constrictor_ tribe, which kills its prey by crushing it, to wind its hideous, speckled coils round his body.

What the snake-charmer is by race or origin ethnologists may determine when they have done with the gipsy. He is not a Hindu. No particular part of the country acknowledges him as its native. He is to the great races, castes, and creeds of India what the waif is to the billows of the sea. His language, in public at least, is Hindustanee, but this is a sort of _lingua franca_, the common property of all the inhabitants of the country. His religion is probably one of the many forms of demon worship which grow rank on the fringes of Hinduism. He must be classed, no doubt, with the other wandering tribes which roam the country, camping under umbrellas, or something little better, each consecrated to some particular form of common crime, and each professing some not in itself dishonest occupation, like the tinkering of gipsies.

But the snake-charmer is the best known and most widely spread of them all. By occupation he is a professor of three occult sciences. First, he is a juggler, and in this art he has some skill. His masterpiece is the famous mango trick, which consists in making a miniature mango tree grow up in a few minutes, and even blossom and bear fruit, out of some bare spot which he has covered with his mysterious basket. It has been written about by travellers in extravagant terms of astonishment and admiration, but, as generally performed, is an extremely clumsy-looking trick, though it is undoubtedly difficult to guess how it is done. A more blood-curdling feat is to put the unclothed and precocious imp aforementioned under a large basket, and then run a sword savagely through and through every corner of it, and draw it out covered with gore. When the sickened spectators are about to lynch the murderer, the imp runs in smiling from the garden gate.

The connection between these performances and the man's second trade, namely, snake-charming, is not obvious to a Western mind; but it must be remembered that the snake-charmer is not a mere, vulgar juggler, amusing people with sleight-of-hand. His feats are miracles, performed with the assistance of superior powers. In short, he is a theosophist, only his converse is not with excorporated Mahatmas from Thibet, but with spirits of another grade, whose Superior has been known from very remote antiquity as an Old Serpent. In deference to this respectable connection the cobra holds a distinguished place even in orthodox Hinduism. So it is altogether fit that a performer of wonders should be on intimate terms with the serpent tribe. The snake-charmer keeps all sorts of them, but chiefly cobras. These he professes to charm from their holes by playing upon an instrument which may have some hereditary connection with the bagpipe, for it has an air-reservoir consisting of a large gourd, and it makes a most abominable noise. As soon as the cobra shows itself the charmer catches it by the tail with one hand, and, running the other swiftly along its body, grips it firmly just behind the jaws, so that it cannot turn and bite. Practice and coolness make this an easy feat. Then the poison fangs are pulled out with a pair of forceps and the cobra is quite harmless. It is kept in a round, flat basket, out of which, when the charmer removes the lid and begins to play, it raises its graceful head, and, expanding its hood, sways gently in response to the music.

Scientific men aver that a snake has no ears and cannot possibly hear the strains of the pipe, but that sort of science simply spoils a picturesque subject like the snake-charmer. So much is certain, that all snakes cannot be played upon in this way: there are some species which are utterly callous to the influences to which the cobra yields itself so readily. No missionary will find any difficulty in getting a snake-charmer to appreciate that Scripture text about the deaf adder which will not listen to the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely.

To these two occupations the snake-charmer adds that of a medicine man, for who should know the occult potencies of herbs and trees so well as he? So, as he wanders from village to village, he is welcomed as well as feared. But one wealthy tourist is worth more to him than a whole village of ryots, so he keeps his eye on every town in which he is likely to fall in with the travelling white man. And the travelling white man would be sorry to miss him, for he is one of the few relics of an ancient state of things which railways and telegraphs and the Educational Department have left unchanged.

The itinerant jeweller and the Sind-work-box-walla are unmistakably being left behind as the East hurries after the West, and we shall soon know them no more. Showy shops, where the inexperienced traveller may see all the products of Sind and Benares, and Cutch and Cashmere, spread before him at fixed prices, are multiplying rapidly and taking the bread from the mouth of the poor hawker. But the snake-charmer seems safe from that kind of competition. It is difficult to forecast a time when a broad signboard in Rampart Row will invite the passer-by to visit Mr. Nagshett's world-renowned Serpent Tamasha, Mungoose and Cobra Fight, Mango-tree Illusion, etc. Entrance, one rupee.


XI


CURES FOR SNAKE-BITE

In a little book on the snakes of India, published many years ago by Dr. Nicholson of the Madras Medical Service, the conviction was expressed that the snake-charmers of Burmah knew of some antidote to the poison of the cobra which gave them confidence in handling it. He said that nothing would induce them to divulge it, but that he suspected it consisted in gradual inoculation with the venom itself. Putting the question to himself why he did not attempt to attest this by experiment, he replied that there were two reasons, which, if I recollect rightly, were, first, that he had a strong natural repugnance to anything like cruelty to animals, and, secondly, that he had observed that as soon as a man got the notion into his head that he had discovered a cure for snake-bite, he began to show symptoms of insanity.

It is rather remarkable that, after so many years, another Scottish doctor, not in Madras, but in Edinburgh, has proved, by just such experiments as Dr. Nicholson shrank from, that an "aged and previously sedate horse" may, by gradual inoculation with cobra poison, be rendered so thoroughly proof against it that a dose which would suffice to kill ten ordinary horses only imparts "increased vigour and liveliness" to it. Further, Dr. Fraser has found that the serum of the blood of an animal thus rendered proof against poison is itself an antidote capable of combating that poison after it has been at work for thirty minutes in the veins of a rabbit, and arresting its effects. And all this has been achieved without apparent detriment to the distinguished doctor's sanity.

This must be intensely interesting intelligence to Englishmen throughout India, and joyful intelligence too, for, scoff as we may at the danger of being bitten by a poisonous snake, nobody likes to think that, if such a thing _should_ happen to him (and very narrow escapes sometimes remind us that it may), there would be nothing for him to do but to lie down and die. And so, ever since the Honourable East India Company was chartered, the antidote to snake poison has been a sort of philosopher's stone, sought after by doctors and men of science along many lines of investigation. And every now and then somebody has risen up and announced that he has found it, and has had disciples for a season.

But one remedy after another, though it might give startling results in the laboratory, has proved to be useless in common life, and the majority of Englishmen have long since resigned themselves to the conclusion that there is no practical cure for the bite of a poisonous snake. For what avails it to carry about in your travelling bag a phial of strong ammonia and to live in more jeopardy of death by asphyxiation than you ever were by snakes, unless you have some guarantee that, when it is your fate to be bitten by a snake, the phial will be at hand? For ammonia must act on the venom before the venom has had time to act upon you, or it will only add another pain to your end; and that gives only a few minutes to go upon. So with nitric acid and every agent that operates by neutralising the poison and not by counteracting its effects. And this has been the character of all the remedies hitherto put forward. "They are," says Sir Joseph Fayrer, "absolutely without any specific effect on the condition produced by the poison."

But "anti-venene," as Dr. Fraser calls his immunised blood-serum, follows the poison into the system, even after the fatal symptoms have begun to show themselves, and arrests them at once. So the Anglo-Indian may throw away his ammonia phial and, arming himself with another of anti-venene and a hypodermic syringe, feel that he is safe against an accident which will never happen. As for the man who is not nervous, he will speak of the new antidote, and think of it as most interesting and valuable, and go on his way as before with no expectation of ever being bitten by a venomous snake. The medical man of every degree will order a supply as soon as it is to be had, and conscientiously try to stamp out the smouldering hope within him that somebody in the station will soon be bitten by a cobra and give him a chance.

Among the dusky millions of India Dr. Fraser's discovery will create no "catholic ravishment" because they will not hear of it. And if they did hear of it they would regard his labours as misapplied and the result as superfluous. For the Hindu has never shared the Englishman's opinion that there is no cure for snake-bite. On the contrary, he is assured that there are not one or two but many specifics for the bite of every kind of snake, known to those whose business it is to know them. If they are not invariably efficacious, it is for the simple reason that if a man's time has come to die he will die. But if his time has not come to die they will not fail to cure him, and since no man can know when he is bitten whether his time has come or not, he will lay the odds against Fate by trying, not one or another of them, but as many as he can hear of or get. Some of them are drastic in their effects, and so it too often proves that the poor man's time has indeed come, for though he might survive the snake he succumbs to the cure.

It is many years now since the news was brought to me one day that a man whom I knew very well had been bitten by a deadly serpent and was dying. He was a fine, strongly built young fellow, a Mohammedan, in the employ of a Parsee liquor distiller, in whose godown he was arranging firewood when he was bitten in the foot. Without looking at the snake