Since the Mantiquiera mountains, the highest in Brazil, are almost perpetually cloud-veiled, the little animal appears to be entirely a creature of cloudland. Its curious colors perhaps have been borrowed as camouflage from the sky. It has a weak voice and its song is very much like that of a bird. It is found in swift mountain brooks, part of whose courses are subterranean.
The Horned Viper Spears Other Animals
Best-known Egyptian cobra is the so-called “spitting serpent” or Libyan asp. It supposedly has the ability to spit in the eyes of its enemies, such as dogs, and the saliva temporarily blinds the victims.
The cobra was a sacred animal in ancient Egypt. It was associated with the sun and with royalty. It formed part of the head dress of solar deities and was represented in the crowns of kings and queens. Toward the end of the 20th dynasty, when it became the custom to preserve sacred animals, it was embalmed at Thebes.
There is a fair possibility that one of the sixteen varieties of Egyptian cobras was the “asp” with which Cleopatra took her own life. It is more probable, however, that she used an even weirder and almost as deadly snake, the horned viper. This serpent is common on the fringes of the Egyptian desert. It buries itself in the hot sand, only its eyes and the top of its head being visible. Its two horns resemble barley seed and attract birds within its reach. When disturbed it can throw itself forward. It was called “aculum” (spear) by the Romans because of this darting motion.
The World of Insects
The Roman naturalist Pliny wrote of ants in the Himalayas “the color of a cat and as large as an Egyptian wolf.” Pliny naively had accepted tales of travellers but the actual curiosities of the insect world are almost as strange as anything he related. There are bugs that live in ice, bugs that are happy only in near boiling water, snow white bugs that dwell deep in the earth, bugs that make their homes in petroleum pools.
None are as big as wolves, but the insect world has its giants as well as its dwarfs. The Atlas moth of India has a wing-spread of nearly a foot. An East Indian walking stick is 15 inches long. The Hercules beetle of Africa sounds like an airplane in flight. Enormous forelegs, more than twice the length of the rest of the body are characteristic of a black wood beetle which covers a space of eight inches with all its legs extended. A curiosity of the Malay Archipelago is a “fly with horns.” It has protuberances on its head which suggest the horns of a deer.
A South African fly has eyes which extend on stalks from the sides of its head. The stalks are so long that the measurement from eye to eye is a third more than the length of the body from head to tail.
One blood-sucking insect can distend itself with blood to more than twelve times its original weight. As the huge meal is digested the abdomen contracts like a deflating balloon.