Truly, even in the wildest regions of the earth, it would be difficult to find a spot still less adapted to the moral and intellectual improvement of its inhabitants than a coral island, despite its cloudless sky, its waving palm trees, its azure lagoon, and the magnificence of the sea hurling its snow-white breakers against the reef.
THE UROPELTIS PHILIPPINUS.
CHAPTER XXIII.
SNAKES.
First Impression of a Tropical Forest—Exaggerated Fears—Comparative rareness of Venomous Snakes—Their Habits and External Characters—Anecdote of the Prince of Neu Wied—The Bite of the Trigonocephalus—Antidotes—Fangs of the Venomous Snakes described—The Bush-master—The Echidna Ocellata—The Rattlesnakes—Extirpated by Hogs—The Cobra de Capello—Indian Snake-Charmers—Maritime Excursions of the Cobra—The Egyptian Haje—The Cerastes—Boas and Pythons—The Jiboya—The Anaconda—Enemies of the Serpents—The Secretary—The Adjutant—The Mongoos—A Serpent swallowed by another—The Locomotion of Serpents—Anatomy of their Jaws—Serpents feeding in the Zoological Gardens—Domestication of the Rat-Snake—Water-Snakes.
On penetrating for the first time into a tropical forest, the traveller is moved by many conflicting emotions. This luxuriance of vegetation revelling in ever-changing forms, these giants of the woods clasped by the python-folds of enormous creepers, and bearing whole hosts of parasites on their knotty arms; this strange and unknown world of plants, harbouring in its impenetrable recesses a no less strange and unknown world of animals, all unite in filling the soul with pleasurable excitement; and yet the heart is, at the same time, chilled with vague fears, that mix like a discordant sound with the harmonies of this sylvan world. For in the hollows of the tangled roots and in the dense underwood of the forest a brood of noxious reptiles loves to conceal itself, and who knows whether a snake, armed with poisonous fangs, may not dart forth from the rustling foliage.
Gradually, however, these reflections wear away, and time and experience convince one that the snakes in the tropical woods are hardly more to be feared than in the forests of Germany or France, where also the viper will sometimes inflict a deadly wound. These reptiles are, indeed, far from being of so frequent occurrence as is generally believed; and on meeting with a snake, there is every probability of its belonging to the harmless species, which show themselves much more frequently by day, and are far more numerous. Even in India and Ceylon, where serpents are said to abound, they make their appearance so cautiously that the surprise of long residents is invariably expressed at their being so seldom seen.
Sir E. Tennent, who frequently performed journeys of two to five hundred miles through the jungle without seeing a single snake, never heard, during his long residence in Ceylon, of the death of a European being caused by the bite of one of these reptiles; and in almost every instance accidents to the natives happened at night, when the animal, having been surprised or trodden on, had inflicted the wound in self-defence. Thus, to avoid danger, the Singhalese, when obliged to leave their houses in the dark, carry a stick with a loose ring, the noise of which, as they strike it on the ground, is sufficient to warn the snakes to leave their path.
During his five years’ travels through the whole breadth of tropical America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, M. de Castelnau, although ever on the search, collected no more than ninety-one serpents, of which only twenty-one were poisonous; a proof that they are not more frequently met with in the primitive forests of Brazil than in the jungles of India or Ceylon.