Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 2, 2025
The cobra loves music; and it is upon these serpents especially that the snake-charmers like to show their skill. They take them about, coiled up in baskets. When the performance is to begin, the lid of the basket is opened, and the charmer, seated on the ground, begins to play upon his pipe.
At Hurdwar, in the great fair, among jugglers and tumblers, horse-tamers and snake-charmers, fakirs and pilgrims, I saw a small boy possessed of a devil, an authentic devil, as of yore, meet for miraculous driving-out.
A writer in an Indian paper asserts that the traditional immunity of Indian snake-charmers is due to the fact that having been accidentally bitten by poisonous serpents or insects more than once, and having survived the first attack, they are subsequently immune.
Sometimes there lived with her people from the other side of the world where they walk with their heads down fakirs and magicians from India and Japan, snake-charmers from Tetuan, people with shaven heads or a long black pigtail, with oblique, sorrowful eyes, loose hips and skin that resembled the greenish leather that Pelle used for ladies' boots.
The fencing is only remarkable for its free and easy style, and the absence of hilts and guards. Yet there are milder pastimes in equal favour, and far more in accordance with the fancy of southerners in warm weather, such as watching a group of jugglers or snake-charmers, or listening to a story-teller.
Commonplace enough all this, but when you have ridden out of town to a little Moorish house on the hillside overlooking the Mediterranean, and are drinking green tea flavoured with mint, on a diwan that must be used with crossed legs, you hardly expect the discussion to be turned to London music-halls. Snake-charmers make a strong appeal to the untutored Moorish crowd.
There are in India and Egypt people that are called snake-charmers, who contrive to extract the fangs containing the venom from the Cobra da capella, or hooded snake; which then become quite harmless.
That will cure faults. That will pull the poison fangs out of passions. That will do for the evil in us what the snake-charmers do by subtle touches, turn the serpent into a rigid rod that does not move nor sting.
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.
Since the exhibitions in London of the two Hindoo snake-charmers the first we believe who ever visited Europe everything relating to serpents seems to have acquired additional interest. Many facts regarding the nature and habits of the various species have been published, affording much information and still greater astonishment.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking