In Winter They
Hibernated There, Tangled Together In A Cluster No Doubt; And In
Summer Nights When They Were At Home, Coiled At Their Ease Or Gliding
Ghost-Like About Their Subterranean Apartments, I Would Lie Awake And
Listen To Them By The Hour.
For although it may be news to some closet
ophiologists, serpents are not all so mute as we think them.
At all
events this kind, the _Philodryas aestivus_ - a beautiful and harmless
colubrine snake, two and a half to three feet long, marked all over
with inky black on a vivid green ground - not only emitted a sound when
lying undisturbed in his den, but several individuals would hold a
conversation together which seemed endless, for I generally fell
asleep before it finished. A hissing conversation it is true, but
not unmodulated or without considerable variety in it; a long
sibilation would be followed by distinctly-heard ticking sounds, as of
a husky-ticking clock, and after ten or twenty or thirty ticks another
hiss, like a long expiring sigh, sometimes with a tremble in it as of
a dry leaf swiftly vibrating in the wind. No sooner would one cease
than another would begin; and so it would go on, demand and response,
strophe and antistrope; and at intervals several voices would unite in
a kind of low mysterious chorus, death-watch and flutter and hiss;
while I, lying awake in my bed, listened and trembled. It was dark in
the room, and to my excited imagination the serpents were no longer
under the floor, but out, gliding hither and thither over it, with
uplifted heads in a kind of mystic dance; and I often shivered to
think what my bare feet might touch if I were to thrust a leg out and
let it hang down over the bedside.
"I'm shut in a dark room with the candle blown out," pathetically
cried old Farmer Fleming, when he heard of his beautiful daughter
Dahlia's clandestine departure to a distant land with a nameless
lover. "I've heard of a sort of fear you have in that dilemma, lest
you should lay your fingers on edges of sharp knives, and if I think a
step - if I go thinking a step, and feel my way, I do cut myself, and I
bleed, I do." Only in a comparatively snakeless country could such
fancies be born and such metaphors used - snakeless and highly
civilized, where the blades of Sheffield are cheap and abundant. In
ruder lands, where ophidians abound, as in India and South America, in
the dark one fears the cold living coil and deadly sudden fang.
Serpents were fearful things to me at that period; but whatsoever is
terrible and dangerous, or so reported, has an irresistible attraction
for the mind, whether of child or man; it was therefore always a
pleasure to have seen a snake in the day's rambles, although the sight
was a startling one. Also in the warm season it was a keen pleasure to
find the cast slough of the feared and subtle creature.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 117 of 186
Words from 61822 to 62334
of 98444
