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Updated: June 25, 2025
Two honest Sikhs, he swore, would die well to such an end. "Drop thy fire and I will fan the flame!" he vowed, and she believed him. "I will send my cobras down to keep the sahib company!" she mocked. But Ranjoor Singh proposed to take one danger at a time, and he was quite sure that she wanted him alive, not dead, for otherwise he would have been dead already.
After a four hours' tramp they all thought they had had enough of it. Felix declared that he preferred to hunt cobras and tigers, for all the game seemed to be very tame to him. Seating themselves on the ground, they rested for an hour, and then started on their return to the boat. All the game was given to the Dyak guides, who were very glad to get it.
And once in Panek's gang, he might find them. And even if this particular gang was not the one doing the plotting in which the Corps was so interested, Hanlon felt that getting into even one of the organized gangs on Simonides would be a step in the right direction. But he would have to watch his step. Those fellows would be about as safe to play with as a pitful of cobras.
It might be thought that a vessel anchored off the coast would be safe from cobras, but cases have been known of these snakes swimming out, crawling up the anchor chains, and creeping on board. The female lays a score of long eggs as large as a pigeon's, but with a soft shell.
In an instant out there slipped a beautiful reddish-brown creature, thin and lithe, with the legs of a stoat, a long, thin nose, and a pair of the finest red eyes that ever I saw in an animal's head. "It's a mongoose," I cried. "Well, some call them that, and some call them ichneumon," said the man. "Snake-catcher is what I call them, and Teddy is amazing quick on cobras.
"An antelope might blunder into a net set for a tiger," said Kirby. "I am here to cut him out again." Yasmini laughed. "With pistols to shoot the cobras and sweat to put out flame? Nay, what is there to cut but the dark that closes up again? Sahib, thou shalt beg for Ranjoor Singh, who struck a hillman in my house, he was so eager to hear treason!"
But some of them, the cobras for instance, develop into what are on the whole perhaps the most formidable of all snakes. The only poisonous colubrine snakes in the New World are the ring- snakes, the coral-snakes of the genus elaps, which are found from the extreme southern United States southward to the Argentine.
A group of sapwallahs, or serpent-charmers, each bearing a basket about fifteen inches in diameter at the bottom, but not more than ten at the top, each containing several cobras, marched into the centre of the crowd. Pious Hindus brought forward bowls of the milk of buffaloes, of which the serpents are very fond, and placed them on the ground.
In olden times, as already intimated, Ceylon was known in the East by the name of Naga-dwipa, "Snake Isle," and it would seem not without good reason, for until quite lately there was a snake-temple on the island of Naiwativoe, which lies just off the shore, west of Jaffna, where many serpents were nourished and cared for, including a number of deadly cobras, by an organized corps of priests.
As he who enjoys with enthusiasm the delights of a tropical garden has also to encounter the attacks of vicious mosquitoes, wiry land leeches, stinging flies, biting scorpions, and poisonous cobras, so the naturalist who dives among these submarine coral groves to secure specimens, and to enjoy the marvelous sights below the surface of the sea, meets with inevitable drawbacks.
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