The Cerastes moves with great rapidity, and in all directions, forward, backward, and sideways. When he inclines to surprise any one who is too far from him, he creeps with his side towards the person, and his head averted, till judging his distance, he turns round, springs upon him, and fastens upon the part next to him; for it is not true what is said, that the Cerastes does not leap or spring. I saw one of them at Cairo, in the house of Julian and Rosa, crawl up the side of a box, in which there were many, and there lye still as if hiding himself, till one of the people who brought them to us came near him, and though in a very disadvantageous posture, sticking as it were perpendicular to the side of the box, he leaped near the distance of three feet, and fastened between the man’s forefinger and thumb, so as to bring the blood. The fellow shewed no signs of either pain or fear, and we kept him with us full four hours, without his applying any sort of remedy, or his seeming inclined to do so.
To make myself assured that the animal was in its perfect state, I made the man hold him by the neck so as to force him to open his mouth, and lacerate the thigh of a pelican, a bird I had tamed, as big as a swan. The bird died in about 13 minutes, though it was apparently affected in 50 seconds; and we cannot think this was a fair trial, because a very few minutes before, it had bit the man, and so discharged part of its virus, and it was made to scratch the pelican by force, without any irritation or action of its own.
The Cerastes inhabits the greatest part of the eastern continent, especially the desert sandy parts of it. It abounds in Syria, in the three Arabias, and in Africa. I never saw so many of them as in the Cyrenaicum, where the Jerboa is frequent in proportion. He is a great lover of heat; for tho’ the sun was burning hot all day, when we made a fire at night, by digging a hole, and burning wood to charcoal in it, for dressing our victuals, it was seldom we had fewer than half a dozen of these vipers, who burnt themselves to death approaching the embers.
I apprehend this to be the aspic which Cleopatra employed to procure her death. Alexandria, plentifully supplied by water, must then have had fruit of all kinds in its gardens. The baskets of figs must have come from thence, and the aspic, or Cerastes, that was hid in them, from the adjoining desert, where there are plenty to this day; for to the westward in Egypt, where the Nile overflows, there is no sort of serpent whatever that I ever saw; nor, as I have before said, is there any other of the mortal kind that I know in those parts of Africa adjoining to Egypt, excepting the Cerastes.
It should seem very natural for any one, who, from motives of distress, has resolved to put a period to his existence, especially women and weak persons unaccustomed to handle arms, to seek the gentlest method to free themselves from that load of life now become insupportable. This, however, has not always been the case with the ancients. Aria, Petus’s wife, stabbed herself with a dagger, to set her husband an example to die, with this memorable assurance, after giving herself the blow, “Petus, it is not painful.” Porcia, the wife of Brutus, died by the barbarous, and not obvious way of perishing, by swallowing fire; the violent agitation of spirits prevailing over the momentary difference in the suffering. It is not to be doubted but that a woman, high-spirited like Cleopatra, was also above the momentary differences in feeling; and had the way in which she died not been ordinary and usual, she certainly would not have applied herself to the invention of a new one. We are therefore to look upon her dying by the bite of the Cerastes, as only following the manner of death which she had seen commonly adopted by those who were intended to die without torment.
Galen speaking of the Aspic in the great city of Alexandria, says, I have seen how speedily they (the aspics) occasioned death. Whenever any person is condemned to die whom they wish to end quickly and without torment, they put the viper to his breast, and suffering him there to creep a little, the man is presently killed. Pausanias speaks of particular serpents that were to be found in Arabia among the balsam trees, several of which I procured both alive and dead, when I brought the tree from Beder Hunein; but they were still the same species of serpent, only some from sex, and some from want of age, had not the horns, though in every other respect they could not be mistaken. Ibn Sina, called by Europeans Avicenna, has described this animal very exactly; he says it is frequent in Shem (that is the country about and south of Damascus) and also in Egypt; and he makes a very good observation on their manners; that they do not go or walk straight, but move by contracting themselves. But in the latter part of his description he seems not to have known the serpent he is speaking of, because he says its bite is cured in the same manner as that of the viper and Cerastes, by which it is implied, that the animal he was describing was not a Cerastes, and the Cerastes is not a viper, both which assertions are false.
The general size of the Cerastes, from the extremity of its snout to the end of its tail, is from 13 to 14 inches. Its head is triangular, very flat, but higher near where it joins the neck than towards the nose. The length of its head, from the point of the nose to the joining of the neck, is 10/12ths of an inch, and the breadth 9/12ths. Between its horns is 3/12ths. The opening of its mouth, or rictus oris 8/12ths. Its horns in length 3/12ths. Its large canine teeth something more than 2/12ths and ½. Its neck at the joining of the head 4/12ths. The body where thickest 10/12ths. Its tail at the joining of the body 2/12ths and ½. The tip of the tail 1/12th. The length of the tail one inch and 3/12ths. The aperture of the eye 2/12ths, but this varies apparently according to the impression of light.
The Cerastes has sixteen small immoveable teeth, and in the upper jaw two canine teeth, hollow, crooked inward, and of a remarkable fine polish, white in colour, inclining to blueish. Near one fourth of the bottom is strongly fixed in the upper jaw, and folds back like a clasp knife, the point inclining inwards, and the greatest part of the tooth is covered with a green soft membrane, not drawn tight, but as it were wrinkled over it. Immediately above this is a slit along the back of the tooth, which ends nearly in the middle of it, where the tooth curves inwardly. From this aperture I apprehend that it sheds its poison, not from the point, where with the best glasses I never could perceive an aperture, so that the tooth is not a tube, but hollow only half way; the point being for making the incision, and by its pressure occasioning the venom in the bag at the bottom of the fang to rise in the tooth, and spill itself through the slit into the wound.
By this flat position of the tooth along the jaw, and its being defended by the membrane, it eats in perfect safety; for the tooth cannot press the bag of poison at the root while it lies in this position, nor can it rise in the tube to spill itself, nor can the tooth make any wound so as to receive it, but the animal is supposed to eat but seldom, or only when it is with young.
The viper has but one row of teeth, none but the canine are noxious. The poison is very copious for so small a creature, it is fully as large as a drop of laudanum dropt from a vial by a careful hand. Viewed through a glass, it appears not perfectly transparent or pellucid. I should imagine it hath other reservoirs than the bag under the tooth, for I compelled it to scratch eighteen pigeons upon the thigh as quick as possible, and they all died nearly in the same interval of time; but I confess the danger attending the dissection of the head of this creature made me so cautious, that any observation I should make upon these parts would be less to be depended upon.