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Often have I lifted mine eyes from the sands dyed red to the glitter and pomp above, and have said, 'Who payeth for all this? Who payeth for the striped-backed and spotted-bellied beasts? Who payeth for the shining pythons and the wild bulls that toss bare bodies until from their bleeding wounds long entrails hang while bejeweled women and swine-snouted men cheer?
After streaming through a portion of this marsh, we came to a broad belt of palm and other trees, crossing the fine plain on the right bank. Marks of large game were abundant. Elephants had been feeding on the palm nuts, which have a pleasant fruity taste, and are used as food by man. Two pythons were observed coiled together among the branches of a large tree, and were both shot.
But there are other reptiles now living that easily beat the ichthyosaurus, such, for example, as the larger pythons or rock-snakes, which not infrequently reach to thirty feet, and measure round the waist as much as a London alderman of the noblest proportions. Of course, other Jurassic saurians easily beat this simple record.
Not a line from father since Colombo, five months gone." "Do you think " "No, no!" replied Kathlyn hastily. "Father sometimes forgets. He may be hunting miles from telegraph wires and railroads; it is only that he should forget us so long. Who knows? He may have dropped down into Borneo. He wanted some pythons, so I heard him say."
Damn me if I see any difference between a frog and a snake, and one of the nicest women I ever knew had two pet pythons that followed her around like kittens. Not such a devilish lot of choice between a frog and a snake except on the side of the frog? What? Anyway, any pet that girl wants is hers, I don't care if it's a leaping twelve-toed lobster or a whale-bodied scorpion. Get me?"
I'm starved." "Thanks! I watched the pythons fed at the zoo once," said Helen with unwonted sharpness. "I will sit here till the scene of savagery is over. You can come back." "You are in a fine mood, I see," observed Tom, and went off chuckling. Nevertheless, he was not feeling very happy himself over the thought that Ruth and Chess Copley were out on the river together.
Song followed song, English and French, and when the lazy current pulsated again, the ball was over. We walked to the beach, Nance and I. "It's hell how this place gets hold of you," said Nance, who had shot pythons in Paraguay and had a yacht in Los Angeles harbor. "I dunno, it must be the cocoanuts or the breadfruit."
As they were not fighting, but exploring, the price of safety was a vigilance so unremitting that it soon began to get on their nerves, and they were glad to take a whole day's rest in the spacious security of a banyan top, where nothing could come at them but leopards or pythons. Neither leopards nor pythons gave them any great concern.
There was a good deal of rumor the last time I was there that when he died England would step in actually. The old boy gave me leave to come and go as I pleased, to hunt where and how I would. I had a mighty fine collection. There are tigers and leopards and bears and fat old pythons, forty feet long. Of course, it isn't the tiger country that Central India is, but the brutes you find are bigger.
No: America too will have to strain its energies, in quite other fashion than this; to crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestle with the Pythons and mud-demons, before it can become a habitation for the gods. America's battle is yet to fight; and we, sorrowful though nothing doubting, will wish her strength for it.
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