A Duel with Snakes

by Edgar Jepson and Captain David Beames

A DUEL WITH SNAKES

IN the city of Ganeshpura lives Anant Ram, the snake-charmer. So great is his fame for triumphs over all the tribes of snakes, that he is known from Kabul to Benares, and from Srinagar to Jubbulpore, as the Nāg Rājā, the Serpent King. And it is said of him that he fears none of them. He has met and worsted the hamadryad in its own jungle, crushing its head as its deadly fangs were buried in his arm. He will excite karaits to bite him, declaring that the poison of that deaf and pulseless serpent soothes him into a pleasant dreaminess. Of cobras he makes little account: they are the stock-in-trade of every paltry conjuror: and thrice has he let the hooded terror bite his tongue, snapping his teeth into its brain as it bit.

All his ghastly feats are feats pure and simple, and lead to nothing. He has never cured a single snake bite, nor would. He has never dreamed of lessening the mortality from that pest by revealing the secret of his own immunity. It was never expected of him, indeed, by his fellow brown men. The native of India sets little store by utility compared with a tamasha—an entertainment. To his mind utility is for the daily round; and in that, what was good enough for his father is good enough for him. It is only the mad Sahibs who try to find a use for things, and cannot enjoy a tamasha quietly.

In course of time there came a Sahib, a doctor named Souter, to Ganeshpura, and saw the feats of Anant Ram. Being a doctor, he was not content to enjoy them, he wanted to know how it was done. He questioned Anant Ram—to no purpose. He caught snakes himself even, to be sure that they were poisonous, and himself applied them to the Nāg Rājā. Afterwards he examined his blood with a microscope, and tested it with things known to the doctor-folk.

The Nāg Rājā affected carelessness of the doctor’s doings. Really he was in great fear that his secret would be discovered. Once, after an operation he had undergone in hospital, for cysts in the liver, the doctors had asked him questions which showed that something had leaked out. As disinterested scientific inquiry was beyond his understanding, he supposed that they wished to make a profit out of what they had learned, and lied freely.

He lay low, and lied to Souter too. But he could not dumb the tongue of rumour; and that tongue, among many lies, told truthfully that the father of Anant Ram had been a snake-charmer, that his mother was the daughter of a snake-charmer, and herself an adept in the art. Souter sought her out, and found her secretive, but garrulous with old age; and he got hints from her talk, and made certain medical observations. He had noticed the dull, dry eye peculiar to the snake-charmer; he observed that he enjoyed the same insensibility to touch, the same strong, though slow, pulse as the eater or smoker of opium. It was plain that he courted and enjoyed the poisonous bite; that his mother enjoyed it no less, though she always shook off the reptile the moment it bit her. Souter had a glimpse of so strange a truth that it set him wild to make sure. He killed every pariah dog in cantonments—in itself a good thing—with his experiments. He puzzled and wondered and worried about the matter day after day, only to find, at the end of months, his glimpse of the truth a glimpse still, and knowledge far away. Then his luck came.

The ever-spreading fame of Anant Ram had reached and vexed the ears of the great snake-charmer of Madras, one Vencatanaiadooswamy. He lived near Metapollium, and was called by his admirers “the Lord of Devils.” And when his vexation became the popular talk, all the gamblers in the Presidency urged him to challenge the Nāg Rājā to a trial of skill, They succeeded: the challenge was sent and accepted; and the terms of the contest were virtually those of a duel. Each man was to bring as many varieties of deadly snakes as he chose. They were to take bites, snake for snake, till one or other died, or funked. The loser was to pay a forfeit, nominally of Rs. 10,000, really of his life. This last clause was not made public, for fear of Government interference.

Owing to a dim feeling in the native mind that the more terrifying the deed the more terrifying its theatre should be, the spot chosen for the duel was near a big marsh in the Doon. There is no spot in India so full of a nameless terror for the natives; for they hold that the Siwaliks, the strange hills in the dense depths of the Doon jungle, heaped over ruins of long-forgotten dead cities, are the tombs of a race of giants who lived before the creation of man, whose spirits, noxious with malefic powers, haunt the resting-places of their dust. You must have a full camp indeed, and many fires, to induce the people of the Doon to camp out with you there. Even the foresters of the Government forests are held uncanny creatures; and as they are madmen, one and all, after five years’ service, the belief seems not unwarranted. This time, at any rate, the native fondness for surrounding the hideous and ghastly with exaggerating circumstances was gratified.

Souter got wind of the duel, and went on leave so as to be present at it. He was the only white man there; and the passion of the native for relying on the white man gave him a free hand. He was elected referee, judge absolute, and stake-holder, with a unanimity as touching as it is significant. And out of the fifty men who waited humbly on him with the request that he would discharge these functions, fourteen were editors of native papers which live by the wildest seditious abuse of the English; while twenty-three were lawyers of sorts, whose every public utterance is rabidly disloyal. These enlightened and capable sucking-rulers knew each other far too well to trust each other even in a matter of sport.

Souter, who had put up at a disused staging bungalow, kept up as a shooting-box by the officers of the Gurkha regiment at Dehra Dun, undertook his job with as serene a confidence as if he had spent all his life arranging gladiatorial shows. He had brought with him a complete assortment of doctor’s tools and little bottles; he was determined to learn all that was to be learned; and by virtue of the powers given him, he set to and examined medically each combatant—there were six a side including the champion—and entered the results in a book previously prepared for the purpose.

The trial was to last indefinitely, with the sole rule that after each test two hours were to elapse before the next, so as to give the men time to die, or recover, or run away. The combatants might not leave the ring; if they left it, they were beaten, and forfeited the stakes; and each man was limited to a narrow loin-strip for all his clothing.

When all was ready, Anant Ram had his baskets of snakes hoisted in over the heads of the spectators, and the “Lord of Devils” did the same. Anant Ram then harangued the crowd, playing with a young cobra as he spoke. The “Lord of Devils” followed suit with two cobras. Then both started a bragging-match, waxing into dreadful fury and abuse; but just at the culminating point, where Englishmen come to blows, either turned quietly round, walked slowly to his place, and sat down. Thus ended the prologue.

The first act began with the dismal wailing of snake-pipes. After nearly an hour of it one of Anant Ram’s pupils suddenly jumped up, drew out a snake from a basket, and tossed it lightly into the centre of the ring. It was a fine specimen of the karait, and it lay where it fell, looking like an old twig half buried in the sand. A pupil of the “Lord of Devils” set down, in a large shallow trough, a gaudy salt-water snake. He then took up the karait, opened its jaws, and placed first his ears and then his tongue between the deadly teeth. The snake was at once slain, and examined by Souter, who pronounced it a truly venomous karait, and no show beast. The young man went to the “Lord of Devils,” drank a draught of some liquid, and sat down to smoke a hookah with his companions. The pupil of Anant Ram took much earnest counsel with his master, and, heedless of the jeers of the crowd, refused to touch the water-snake, at the end of an hour's waiting. The Madras side scored one, though their man looked very ill, and had to be doctored by his master. Souter superintended the dosing, and collected a supply of each medicine before it was administered. At the end of the two hours the man was on the way to recover, though still very shaky.

The next pair now came on, Anant Ram playing a cobra against the untouched water-snake. The result was that his pupil was well in an hour and a half, while his opponent died. This made the score even.

These two were followed by a noisy pair who played either a daboia (Russel’s viper) and executed several fantastic movements with this handsome and monstrous serpent. At the end of two hours neither was a bit the worse. This snake uses its poison-fangs rarely, though it often crushes like a constrictor, and tears bad wounds with its fixed teeth. It seemed probable that no venom had been injected into either of them, though both were badly bitten. At this point Souter stopped the contest for the day, refusing to judge except by clear daylight.

During the night he held a post-mortem on the dead man, and assured himself that he had died from snake-bite. But he made some important discoveries, and proceeded to verify them on the spot, by certain experiments on a pariah dog.

The next day the prologue was again enacted, but only two pupils remained on each side, besides the masters. In the first round a very small but deadly snake, common in the jungles of Ceylon, was matched against a kind of garter snake, which lives in the Scinde desert and is reckoned very deadly indeed. They call it “Whisper of Death,” because it is said to steal into the ear of a sleeping man, and to bite into his brain the moment he stirs in his sleep. Both men evidently funked the ordeal, and put off the bite as long as they could, by conferring with their masters, by having the reptiles examined by Souter, and by wrangling as to whether it was admissible to use snakes not strictly belonging to the provinces of the champions.

At last, however, amid the howling of the excited crowd, the throbbing of drums, wailing of snake-pipes, and the clanking and jangling of chain-bows, the heroes dashed at their fate. The Madras man showed his snake dangling from his left side under the breast; but at the last moment the Panjāb hero flung down the “Whisper of Death,” and bolted yelling. At the end of the two hours the pupil of the “Lord of Devils” showed no signs of illness; and Madras was a win to the good.

The two last pupils stood forth boldly and eagerly, each holding a cobra in his hand. They advanced to one another, and by a simultaneous movement one received the bite on his tongue, the other in the throat. There was much applause at their dexterity among the connoisseurs in the crowd. Then Fortune declared herself against Anant Ram: while the Madras man got off with an hour’s illness, his own pupil died. Madras was two wins to the good, and Anant Ram to win had to meet two besides the “Lord of Devils.” If he defeated the three of them, he gained the championship of all India; if he died, he died with untarnished fame against impossible odds.

Souter, at the request of all, adjourned the last struggle till the morrow. In the evening special conditions were drawn up for the duel between the masters: the “Lord of Devils” was to take three bites from the Panjāb snake—one on the nape of the neck, one on the left ear, and one in the left armpit. Anant Ram was to take three bites from the Madras snake, but on any part the snake chose. If he worsted their master, he was to meet the two undefeated pupils, snake for snake, one bite from each. From beginning to end none of the four was to touch food, drink, or medicine; and each was to fight stark naked, in full view of the crowd.

On the morrow there was a long delay: the prologue was spun out and spun out. Each of the masters was in a very keen anxiety as to the snake the other had been reserving for the great effort. At last Souter came to the end of his patience, and bade them peremptorily play or pay. Thereupon Anant Ram set a small cloth on the ground very gently, and called loudly to have the first go. The “Lord of Devils” did not stand upon the order of his going; agreed on the instant; and his two pupils turned up a large basket in the middle of the ring and shook out of it about nine feet of that poisonous constrictor, the great hamadryad or King Cobra.

It is the only snake in India that attacks of itself at all times. Its fierceness and courage are only equalled by the brightness of its colouring and the strength of its coils. It can poison as mortally and strangle as surely as any snake in the world. The Egyptian cerastes attacks and bites; the fer-de-lance of St. Lucia drops from the tree, vicious and fatal, on the horseman. But they are not constrictors. The great hamadryad rears its green length of active, twofold, ferocious death in unparalleled dreadfulness.

Anant Ram threw up his arms over his head as the double horror rushed hissing at him: in a breath its coils were round him, its fangs tearing his arms. He flung himself down at the pain; and put about by this sudden act the snake stopped biting a moment to tighten its coils. Then it reared a quarter of its body above his head, and as quickly as it could bend and strike, bit him horribly in the neck under the left ear. On the instant, it jerked out its fangs with a shrill whistle, and fell all slack about him: he had bitten clean through its back, and was tearing its body asunder with frenzied hands.

He rose bleeding, dusty, wild-eyed, and ghastly; staggered to the cloth that hid his snake; and yelled, “Quick! to the trial! All three of you! Quick!”

The “Lord of Devils” and his pupils hustled round him; he whipped away the cloth, and bared to their eyes a little, crooked, grey-brown stick. They stared at it, they stared at one another; and slowly knowledge came to them. They knew how Anant Ram had conquered the hamadryad: that he had won the devils to fight for him. They moved round the little stick, with outstretched, twitching hands, their starting eyes glued to it, striving to beat down their dread, to force themselves to touch it, to awake it to malignant life. Slowly their dread mastered them; their faces grew grey and then green; one man gave back a step, then another; one by one they tore away their eyes from the dormant horror; glared at one another in the agony of utter fear; turned with one accord, and fled—fled as men flee with the fear of death at their backs, and the devils of the lone Night and the waste on their heels.

But Anant Ram lay, heedless of the screaming joy of the victorious Panjāb, sucking the blood of the dead hamadryad for dear life, while his pupils, in fevered haste, plied him with remedy on remedy.

In the confusion Souter secured yet more material to make surer his discoveries, and to render this mystery of the East a working medicine against the terror of the serpent.

Anant Ram came out of it alive, and rich; but he swears that in winning his great fight he lost the secret of ages. He dreads Souter, as he dreads nothing else; and to him alone will he reveal the mysteries of his craft.

D. Beames, Captain
Edgar Jepson