When the Gypsies have exhausted the contributory possibilities of the adjoining villages they move on again to another camping ground. They have always a number of dogs which assist in catching animals for the food supply, and it is few, whether provided with legs or without legs, that are thought unfit to eat. The diet includes white ants, rat-snakes, owls, and munguses, as well as any stray village fowls that can be acquired surreptitiously.
These Gypsies of Ceylon are an interesting race, and I may be permitted a digression in order to furnish some details regarding them. I am not aware how long they have settled in Ceylon; they are permanent dwellers in the island, and are especially found in the northern half and the eastern districts, but also in the south and in the hill districts. In the Sinhalese districts they have developed a dialect which appears to be a curious compound of Telugu and Sinhalese. Thus fowls, which in Telugu are termed Kōllu, are known by them as Guglu, the Sinhalese Kukuḷu.
From a Gypsy with whom, by the aid of pecuniary intervention, I established friendly relations, cemented by my presenting him one day with a fine newly-caught cobra, I learnt that they enjoy general good health, notwithstanding the apparent hardships of their life. They attribute this to their constant changes of drinking-water and camping-sites, no camp being maintained in one place for more than seven days in the Sinhalese districts. In the Eastern Province, where the Gypsies possess very large herds of cattle, amounting sometimes to four or five hundred, they camp in one spot for a month if the grazing be sufficiently good.
They do not keep their cobras for more than a month. After being kept for that period, they not only become too tame to “dance,” but, what is far more important, their poison fangs grow afresh, and it would be dangerous to retain them. They are therefore always released at the end of that time, if not earlier. They are fed regularly upon fowls’ eggs and occasional rats.
My friend characterised as nonsense the idea of their handling and using cobras which have not had their fangs excised. The reader may remember Sir Bartle Frere’s note in Old Deccan Days, p. 329, regarding a boy who continued to handle with impunity poisonous snakes with unremoved fangs, until at last one killed him. The reader is also referred to Drummond Hay’s Western Barbary, 1844, pp. 105–108, in which an account is given of a snake-charmer who allowed a deadly snake to bite him. A fowl that it bit immediately afterwards died in a minute, while the man did not suffer from the bite. Hay saw the snake’s fangs. He mentions another instance at Tangier, in which a youth who was sceptical regarding the poison allowed the snake to bite him, and died from the effect of it.
I saw this Gypsy cut off the fangs of the cobra that I gave him. This was done with a common pen-knife which he kept for the purpose. The head being held sideways on a thick stick, so that the upper jaw lay on it, the fang was cut off at the base. The head was then turned, and the other fang removed. The man then passed his fore-finger along the jaw, and finding a slight roughness or projection, sliced off a little of the bone at each side. After this he released the cobra, which followed him and sprang at him furiously, time after time, and had its first lesson on the ease with which he evaded its strokes. When it became tired of attempting the impossible, he consigned it to his basket—another cobra ready for exhibition.
Some of these men are extraordinarily expert in making pretended captures of cobras which they apparently fascinate by their pipes, so as to attract them from their holes or hiding-places. They perform this feat so cleverly as to deceive many people, who insist that it is a real capture. I have twice got them to do it for me—in the Southern and the North-western Provinces—and although I watched them from a very short distance, I was unable to see whence the cobra was produced. On both occasions I examined the mouth of the cobra immediately after it was captured, and in both instances I found that the fangs had been removed. My Gypsy friend also assured me that it was a mere trick which only a few learn.
In each case, the man, who was dressed only in a cloth extending from the waist to the calf, after piping for some time at the edge of the bushes in which the snake might possibly be found, bent down suddenly, half entering the bush, and apparently endeavoured to seize a cobra which eluded him. After resuming the piping for a few seconds more, he bent down again at the same spot, and drew out a large cobra—one was nearly six feet long; it extended to the full length of his outstretched hands—holding it by the tail; then slipping his other hand rapidly along its body he grasped it tightly behind the jaws. Probably when first bending down he placed a cobra on the ground, afterwards seizing it by the tail as it was moving off.
In one case, a pretence at being bitten on the thumb on the way back from the bush was very effective. There were two bleeding punctures between the nail and the knuckle, at the right distance apart, and the expressions of pain no doubt were not altogether simulated.
The supposed poison was extracted by means of the usual spells and remedial agents—a charmed piece of creeper and a tiny ball of lime, the latter to check the progress of the poison along the arm, and the former to draw it down to the wounds; and two “snake stones”—nearly flat rectangular pieces of horn slightly hollowed on one side—which were placed on the wounds to extract the poison. These “stones” adhere by atmospheric pressure when wetted and pressed on the skin with the hollowed side downwards. I have been informed that the wounds are made by pressing on the thumb a thorny seed capsule which has two sharp spikes at a suitable distance apart.