CHAPTER VIII.
THE GLOTTIS.
ONE Friday in august 1873, while watching a large python, at the Zoological Gardens, swallowing a duck which it had just killed, I was struck by a singular something projecting or hanging from the side of the snake’s mouth. It looked like a kind of tube or pipe, about one inch and a half or two inches of which were visible. The python had rather an awkward hold of the duck, having begun at the breast with the neck doubled back, the head forming some temporary impediment to the progress of the jaws upon the prey. So the strange protuberance gave one a ‘sort of turn,’ and a shudder. It looked as if it might be some part of the crushed bird, and then again it had the appearance of some internal arrangement; and another shudder crept over one as the idea suggested itself that the poor snake had ruptured its throat in some way. What could this queer thing be, hanging on one side, as you see the tongue of a horse or dog sometimes lolling sideways over its lower jaw? While intently pondering and observing this strange tube-like object, in size somewhat as big as the edge of a thimble, I saw the end of it moving of itself, an orifice contracting and closing tight, by the loose skin puckering up, so to speak. Presently it opened, and by and by again closed tight, as you see the breathing orifice of the octopus contract and expand, open and close, at regular intervals, only in the present case the intervals were not regular. This strange tube, then, had life and volition in it! What could it be?
Suddenly a certain day of one’s childhood flashed into my mind, and a certain scene of home. One Michaelmas Day it was, when, having stolen surreptitiously into the kitchen to coax the cook to ‘let me see the goose!’ I found her busy preparing the bird, and clambered into a chair to watch her. ‘What’s that?’ I demanded, seeing part of a long, pipe-like looking thing lying there.
‘Oh, that’s the windpipe. That’s like what you’ve got in your throat; and that’s where the crumbs get to make you choke so,’ in allusion to a recent occurrence.
I gazed with awe and interest at that very strange thing, and wondered if it really could be like anything in my own throat, and where it began and ended, and so on. And that goose’s windpipe was indelibly stamped on my memory.
And now that scene came vividly back to me, for there was a windpipe sort of look about this appendage to the snake’s jaw, only it did not appear to be bruised or injured in any way. Nor from the position of the duck (by this time half swallowed) could it belong to the bird. And, again, it moved with an independent motion!
And now the snake threw up its head, to free the legs of the duck from its folds where it had been held, and as you see horses toss up their heads to get the grain in the bag hung on their noses, and I saw the tube-like object still more plainly. Then, with a strange, awe-struck feeling, came a conviction that this could be nothing less than the poor snake’s windpipe, and that something must be very wrong with it.
I beckoned to the keeper, and pointed to it, telling him, ‘I do think that must be its windpipe. Is it hurt?’