CHAPTER XVI
A SERPENT MYSTERY
A new feeling about snakes--Common snakes of the country--A barren
weedy patch--Discovery of a large black snake--Watching for its
reappearance--Seen going to its den--The desire to see it again--A
vain search--Watching a bat--The black serpent reappears at my feet--
Emotions and conjectures--Melanism--My baby sister and a strange
snake--The mystery solved.
It was not until after the episode related in the last chapter and the
discovery that a serpent was not necessarily dangerous to human
beings, therefore a creature to be destroyed at sight and pounded to a
pulp lest it should survive and escape before sunset, that I began to
appreciate its unique beauty and singularity. Then, somewhat later, I
met with an adventure which produced another and a new feeling in me,
that sense of something supernatural in the serpent which appears to
have been universal among peoples in a primitive state of culture and
still survives in some barbarous or semi-barbarous countries, and in
others, like Hindustan, which have inherited an ancient civilization.
The snakes I was familiar with as a boy up to this time were all of
comparatively small size, the largest being the snake-with-a-cross,
described in an early chapter. The biggest specimen I have ever found
of this ophidian was under four feet in length; but the body is thick,
as in all the pit vipers.
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