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Updated: June 2, 2025
"As simple a mortal as you or I," remarked the Rajput with a smile, "and, what is more, he is very ignorant. The truth is, he has been brought up in a Shivaite pagoda, like all the real snake-charmers.
Peterkin was wondering how Julius Cæsar would have managed to eat his salad with his fork, before forks were invented, and then he fell into a fit of abstraction, planning to say "Vale" to the guests as they left, but anxious that the word should not slip out before the time. Eight little boys and three Hindu snake-charmers were eating copiously of frozen pudding.
We also saw some bunis, snake-charmers, with dozens of various snakes round their waists, necks, arms, and legs models well worthy of the brush of a painter who intended to depict the image of a male Fury. One jadugar was especially remarkable. His head was crowned with a turban of cobras.
During the third week it was true that matters always according to Mr. Greyne's letters home slightly improved. While walking near the quay, in active search for nautical outrage, he saw an Arab dock labourer, who had been over-smoking kief, run amuck, and knock down a couple of respectable snake-charmers who were on the point of embarkation for Tunis with their reptiles.
One day about four years ago three snake-charmers came to my house, and as I had an American friend and his son with me, I decided for the boy's sake to have them try their art. Only two of the men had flutes, but one went into my garden and one took up his post on another side of the house, and began to play.
Shall we permit the plague or the cholera to decimate our land because God punishes us in that way for violating the laws he has set up in our bodies? "This subject is too large for me to pursue it in detail. I need not describe the cobra, for you will see no end of them about the streets of the cities in the hands of the snake-charmers. He is five feet or more in length.
"There are instances, however, of the venomous serpents biting the snake-charmers, who have thus lost their lives. "At one of the stations where my husband was quartered, snakes were very numerous, and we used to keep a mongoose in the house to destroy them. It is a pretty little animal, a species of ichneumon with catlike habits and a very prying disposition.
The snake-charmers do not previously train the snakes, but will charm those only just caught, quite as well as those they carry about with them. "They use for this purpose, a hollow gourd on which they play a buzzing music. On one occasion, three men appeared, dressed only in their turbans and waist cloths, in which it was impossible they could have concealed any snakes.
It is the square of the living now, the centre of all the life, amusement and gossip of Marrakech, and the spectators are so thickly packed about the story-tellers, snake-charmers and dancers who frequent it that one can guess what is going on within each circle only by the wailing monologue or the persistent drum-beat that proceeds from it.
Yet the consciousness of festivities sometimes obtruded upon his indifference. Now and then on summer evenings, when the wind was from the west, certain brazen discords originating a street or two behind the house would come to advise him that the Circassian girl was on view, or that a convention of lady snake-charmers was in session.
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