The brutal sport is a passion, and is to be seen going on almost everywhere on festal days, and in the evenings in the cool shadows of awnings and palms.
Alfred Marché published a book in Paris in 1887 entitled Luxon and Palaveran; Six Annes de Voyages aux Philippines. It contains some vivid pictures of the natives, of the habits and customs of the country, of the earthquakes and storms. He describes the earthquake seasons when the earth trembled, and the people rushed wildly into the open courts at the first tremor. As great as the terror was the Chinese did not leave their merchandise unprotected for fear of thieves, showing that the trembling earth did not overcome the nature of the merchant or the native thief. The one would face death for his goods and the other for his chance of getting plunder.
Monsieur Marché gives some views of the tropic jungles, one of which is illustrated by a very curious anecdote and pictorial illustration.
One day one of his native servants told him that he had seen in the woods an immense python, which seemed to have been gorged with some animal that he had swallowed, and so rendered sluggish and resistless.
"I should like to see so large a serpent," said the traveler.
An hour afterward, while he was sitting in the shadow of his bungalow, an extraordinary sight met his eyes. The native had gone into the wood and had put a cord about the neck of the great serpent and attached it to the horns of a buffalo, and the buffalo was dragging the python toward the bungalow. The python was seven meters long (thirty-nine inches to a meter), a distended mass of folds and flesh (page 356, Alfred Marché's Luzon).
What had he swallowed? What creature was there inside of him that was about to be digested, and that so distorted his folds?
The serpent was harmless in the noose and from the weight of his meal.
The traveler severed the python's vertebræ, rendering it inoffensive, and then made an incision into its abdomen.
A surprise followed. Out of the abdomen came a calf of some months' growth. The animal's legs were so doubled under its body as to make the latter horizontal. The serpent was prepared for the museum of the traveler.