Oriental Stories/Volume 1/Issue 1/The Cobra Den
"Upstairs was a man cold in death."
The Cobra Den
By Paul Ernst
Venomous snakes and a wild adventure among the Arabs of Northern Africa
When Edwin Weiss came to Kairouan, one of the thin trickle of tourists who pass through that grimly dirty city, he made several mistakes that would have seemed incredible had not one remembered that never before had he lifted his shiny, pointed shoes off the pavements of New York.
His first mistake was when he landed from the overland touring-bus that had carried, among the twenty or so others, the dark-haired woman with the lights in her eyes who was the wife of Dancher-man. He looked around him then, glanced furtively into the face of the woman, gazed again at the fairy-tale wildness of surrounding city and plain—and decided that in such a place a man might take in his own hands any laws he chose and break them with impunity!
Now, Kairouan is two cities. The first is the enigmatic Arab stronghold peopled with strange beings and mystery and age-old dirt. Seven pilgrimages here equal one trip to Mecca itself; and even as in Mecca the citizens have their own harsh laws and their own discrimination in enforcing them.
The second city is not so much a city as it is a tenuous human stream of travelers come with guide-book and camera to glimpse the land which they have formerly known only in geographies and company pamphlets. This second, smaller city is as decorous and rigidly policed as any metropolis on the Continent; and a man may no more go unpunished here than he could in Paris or London.
Weiss did not realize this. He trailed gingerly along behind the guide, noted the dark brown eyes and light gray eyes that stared at the party with indolent hatred, gazed fearfully into caverns of bazaars, saw murder written in the face of every inoffensive rug-vendor. And he glanced again at Danchcrman's wife.
As they went, the guide told stories of violent deeds done in the secretive-looking buildings that lined the alleylike streets. Achmed spoke English with an Oxford accent, and spent his time out of tourist season in Vienna; but now he was dressed in burnoose and fez, and inspired repressed horror in the lady tourists when he came too close to them. And Weiss' sheltered nerves quivered and his delicate, musician's fingers tingled to their tips.
In the market-place, where the wares of the meat stalls hang flyblown and glistening in the African sun, a crowd was collected. Snatches of one-sided conversation floated over the circle of heads, as though someone were talking to himself in the coughing, explosive manner of the Arabic language. This was succeeded now and again by a thin wailing of some musical instrument and the beat of a drum.
The guide led the way to the crowd and pushed aside a segment of the human circle until his tourist flock could see into the ring.
The magnet of attraction was a snake-charmer. His thin, dirt-crusted arms darted out toward and away from several sluggish, fat cobras. He talked to them, crooned to them, danced around them in time to the drum. He lifted them and dragged them in the dust, rebuking and laughing as though addressing human things. And the cobras swayed lazily and turned their hooded necks to face him always as he moved about them.
Weiss stared, hypnotized. The muscles of his soft body crawled, and he felt as though someone had emptied his white skin and poured it full of ice water. He had never seen a snake before, not even in the zoo of his habitual city. The supple, dirt-colored things were horrible to him—horrible!
When the snake-charmer's bare hand touched the repulsive flesh, his own hand ached from the vicarious contact. As the performer clutched one of the wriggling things just under the head, Weiss could feel fire running through his body in anticipation of the poison fangs that might be sunk next instant into the charmer's arm. Once when the largest cobra shook off its drugged coma for an instant and made a lightning dart at the figure that danced about it, Weiss too drew back as though his own body had been threatened. And as he bumped hysterically against the big man beside him—a cattleman on a vacation—the big man smiled with tolerant disdain.
But the musician's newly discovered fear of snakes didn't numb his mind to the growing feeling of outlawry that was instilled in him by the stark mystery of Kairouan. When the performance was ended and the charmer put the cobras and the livelier, non-poisonous wood snakes back into their gunny-sacks, Weiss was plumbing ever deeper into wells of barricaded desire; and he was planning, planning.
He stared at the sacks, moving with their deadly freight. He glanced furtively at Dancherman—less furtively at Dancherman's woman. And Kairouan was off the face of the civilized earth, with policemen and law courts a thousand miles away.
A child should have been more subtle than Weiss.
Within an hour every Arab in Kairouan
knew that the undersized
little tourist with the shallow chin and
the soft brown eyes had bought one of
the charmer's cobras. The house-boy
saw him carrying a gunny-sack toward
Dancherman's room, holding the sack
away from him at arm's length, his face
gray with fear of the thing he carried.
And everyone noticed how he kept Dancherman's
wife downstairs by the tinkly
piano until long after Dancherman had
gone to bed.
As Weiss played on and on, obliging with some of his own popular song hits as well as with the frankly better tunes of others, he began to get uneasy. His fingers trembled on the keys; though to hide this he played louder and louder.
Upstairs was a man cold in bed; beside him a writhing thing that splayed its hooded neck and crawled across the stiffened limbs. . . .
He cringed, and missed a beat in the neat syncopation of the piece he was playing. Where had Dancherman been bitten? Or—had he seen the coiled form under the blankets in time to avoid it? TTiis was unlikely. He would have been down again long before now, telling of the narrow escape, a little suspicious, perhaps, but unable to make any accusations in this land of snakes and wildness.
No. The snake must have done its work, because Dancherman had gone into his room and not come out again. But—Weiss missed another beat as this fact, too, began to seem threatening—surely he must have felt the stab of the cobra's fangs. And surely he must have become aware of the slowly moving coils the instant he got into bed. Why, then, was there no uproar—no rushing about and poking into other beds to see if there were more of the deadly things in the house?
He looked at the watch on his wrist and noted that it had been over an hour since Dancherman had left the room. And now, beside him, the woman with the little glints in her dark eyes must be told that the hints she had thrown him during the trip had borne fruit—that she was free to take the man she had seemed to prefer to her husband.
Three elderly men poked out the stubs of their cigars at about the same instant, and rose to leave the lounge. Weiss watched them go, their figures blurring in his sight as they filed out the door and left him alone with Mrs. Dancherman.
He stopped playing and turned to her. It didn't take long to describe to her some of what had happened. She guessed a part of it from the look on his face; and before he was half through with his mumbled story she had risen and was looking at him as though he were loathsome in her sight.
Under the look, Weiss drew into himself, and he swayed on the stool as he saw her throat swell to a scream. He foresaw the end of all things for himself in that alarm—confused crowds surrounding him, eyes growing harder as they stared at him, a talc of self-confessed murder, retribution!
Bue the outcry never came. Her throat choked over the attempted sound. Her eyes showed white, and she crumpled to the floor.
She had hardly fallen before Weiss was up from the piano stool and racing for the door. In his mind was no plan, no course of action—only blind haste to get away before she should regain her senses and repeat his story to the others. And as he went he raged against a woman who should lure a man on and then turn against him when he had given her the highest proof of his love—never admitting to himself that she had lured him on only in his own opinion.
In the effort to get away from the hotel, go anywhere before the woman could recover and accuse him, he promptly lost himself in the Arab section of town. It is not good to wander alone at night in the native quarters of such towns as Kairouan. And, rushing hopelessly down one street and another, he was numb with fear of his surroundings.
For the first time the enormous stupidity of the thing he had done came crashing home to him. An alien in a wild and hostile land, unable to speak the language, unable to ask for help or shelter, hunted by every European—or soon to be hunted—with death waiting for him if he were caught! Tears of self-pity welled in his eyes and fell salt to his lips.
The darkness was appalling. Never a light in a house, narrow alleys ending in blank walls into which he often bumped blindly. Now and then a puny street lamp planted determinedly by the French government, but placed usually in such a way that the crooked outjutting of building walls cut off the light within a few feet. Darkness and quiet—the dark and quiet of a great storm about to burst, and in the center of its threatening, the little man, Weiss!
A shadowy, white-robed figure appeared suddenly before him, seeming to have risen from the stones of the street. It may have been the glint of starlight on a knife blade, or merely the reflction on one of the crescent silver pins worn in that land; but, not stopping to find out, Weiss jumped back and ran down the nearest open way.
One of the white, savage desert dogs leaped snarling from the tunneled darkness. Weiss heard the fabric of his trouser leg rip, and felt teeth in his ankle. He kicked out and was rid of the brute.
Finally—lights ahead! The low doorway of an Arab café gleamed like a dim moon in the blackness of house walls, and he went toward it cautiously. A few yards away, however, he observed that the men in the café were gathered about one of their number, and all seemed to be talking excitedly. The central figure was the snake-charmer! He appeared to be describing some incident—the sale of one of his cobras, perhaps?
Another shadowy figure rose in front of him as he turned to skulk away from possible discovery. This time there was no retreat, and he mouthed a prayer to the God he had never before acknowledged, feeling already the slash of a knife in his belly. The figure, however, bowed servilely and spoke in broken English:
"M'sieur wish to see the night things of the ville, perhaps?"
Weiss could have cried on the man's shoulder with the relief of it. He tried to speak without losing his last shred of self-control and babbling incoherently.
"I am not looking for sights. I want an automobile. A motor-car. Vous savez? Automobile. I want to go away from here quick. God—there's probably no such thing as a car here!"
There was, it developed. A friend of a friend had a very gorgeous and beautiful automobile. Very fast. Very fine. But—so late at night, with a wind whipping up that would bring sand from the desert a few hundred kilometers south—he might ask a great deal for the use of it.
Weiss dragged at his wallet, and the beady black eyes gleamed as he opened it in the distant light of the café. Yes, yes! For all that he could have the so beautiful machine to drive him away at once. The shadowy, white figure sank into the street's darkness.
As he waited for the man's return, Weiss tried to form some kind of a plan. He would be driven to Tunis. Ought to reach there before noon of the next day. Then some kind of a disguise, some vague manner of getting on a boat bound for Mexico or South America. But the main thing was to leave here at once and get to Tunis. In Tunis were coffeeskinned gentlemen who spoke English and would surely hide him and get him a passport of sorts in exchange for the balance of the franc notes he had in his wallet.
Two figures suddenly stood beside him. Again the broken speech of the man who had gone for the car. He was informed huskily that the street they were in was, of course, too narrow for an automobile to negotiate. Would he please follow?
He stepped on the heels in front of him in his haste. The other man was the driver and owner of the car. He could speak no English, and stalked aloof in dirt and dignity. He would be told, through the first, where he was to go. Tunis? But certainly!
The walk was a long one. Then, as
though chopped off with an ax, the
town abruptly ended and open country
stretched before their eyes. In front of
him, Weiss saw the so beautiful motorcar—an
unstable-looking, sand-scoured,
ancient Renault. The man cranked it,
proving either that the battery wasn't
strong enough to turn the engine, or that
the starter was out of order. Weiss wondered
if anything else were out of commission.
The motor suddenly caught with a nerve-filing grind of bearings. Cars do not last long down there. Each wind raises clouds of fine sand and sweeps north from the father of sands; and sand is not good for bearings. As the machine wheezed off to a start in the direction of Sousse, it shuddered and clanked as though its heart had long since been eaten out by the grit and it was now running entirely by the will-power of the man who huddled behind the wheel.
Over the howl of worn parts, Weiss asked the driver how long it would take to reach Tunis. Then he remembered that he couldn't reply. The bar of language raised a new horror during the night ride. It was as though he were being driven by a ghost—a surly ghost that mumbled to itself in Arabic, and turned to look at him with light gray eyes that seemed like holes leading down into knowing darkness.
An hour out of town, Weiss looked back and cursed. Far behind, a pair of headlights bobbed up and down over the rough road, and moved forward even as they moved, so that an even distance was kept between them. He punched the driver in the shoulder and waved ahead, trying to indicate that he wanted more speed. The driver nodded, sank lower in his seat, and the pound and shriek of worn bearings reached a higher key.
The acceleration was too much. A final pound, as though the motor had kicked itself through the hood—and there was a silence that was startling after the noise of flight. Something had broken.
The driver got stolidly from his seat and raised the hood. Then he shrugged helplessly.
Weiss swore at him, less afraid of him than of the car behind, which was nearing them by the second. Thinking the man was pretending so that he might return home to his bed, he offered more money. Again the stolid shrug. Even bribes can not move a broken connecting-rod.
The other automobile was now so near that he could hear the whine of its engine. He visioned it as full of men with guns, searching for him. Dead or alive. The phrase came to him from some dimly remembered reading. Dead or alive! They probably had orders to take him that way.
With a last helpless look at the stalled car and the wooden-faced Arab bending over the motor, he turned and raced away from the road—into the dark, unfenced fields about him.
Compared to the real desert, the land
around Kairouan is a fruitful paradise.
But it is that way only by comparison.
Bare, hard-baked dirt that supports
a few scrubby olive groves and
tough dry brush, it is desolate enough.
To the man from the sleek pavements of
New York it seems like the outer
stretches of hell itself.
While the breath in his lungs lasted, he ran into the dark, staggering over loose stones and tripping in the scratchy brush. Then, when his chest was a burning ache and his heart pounded in his throat, he fell over something large and soft and warm that made a rasping bark and snapped at him with yellow teeth.
Around him were other large, dim shapes. It was several minutes before the prosaic explanation soothed his wildly jumping nerves—merely camels, hobbled to keep them from straying too far afield. He got up and walked forward, his hand pressed against his heart.
An hour before dawn, he sank down in the gritty dirt of the plain, entirely exhausted. Too done in to think, he could only lie and suffer from the cold as the sweat of his fear and effort dried on his body. If only he could find some kind of shelter that would protea him from the cold night wind, and help to hide him through the daylight hours of the morrow!
As though in answer to a prayer, he suddenly noticed an irregular triangle, darker than the surrounding darkness. It looked like the door to a very low, peak-roofed hut—some kind of shelter, probably for the herdsmen. On hands and knees he crawled toward it.
With a ragged sigh of relief he lunged into the opening. . . .
Instantly he was falling! Down he plunged, his hands scraping over smooth, damp stones as he tried to check his descent. His head hit a projecting stone and consciousness was snapped out.
It was probably not more than a few seconds before he came to his senses again; but it was long enough to force on him the feeling that he had died and been reborn—into a new and terrible world where nothing lived and light was not yet created. So strong was the impression that for minutes he lay motionless on the rock floor, without thought, without conjecture of any kind.
A sharp pain stabbed his wrist. He moved it tentatively, and cried aloud at the hùrt of, it. Probably broken. Into the welter of more poignant emotions crept the realization that he might never play the piano again.
Gently he moved his legs, finding them unhurt. He must now dismiss the crazy notion that he had been transported into another and more terrible universe, and discover what kind of a pit held him prisoner.
He did not know it, but he had fallen into a cistern constructed by some worthy Roman colonist nearly two thousand years ago when north Africa was the granary of Rome. It was deep, with sheer rock walls that baffled all hand-holds—a square well of a thing with only a few feet of the arched roof left above the shifting sand and silt of ages. To climb out of it was impossible. Had it been deliberately built for a prison it could not have served that purpose better.
It took but a few moments for him to discover this. Holding his hurt wrist above his head so that it would not throb so keenly, he felt around the four walls. As high as he could reach in every spot there was no projection for him to cling to.
Once he shouted for help, then caught himself on the edge of the second cry. Of what use to call? If a European should hear him he would probably be taken back to Kairouan—to face the body of Dancherman. If an Arab should answer he would be unable to tell the man what he wanted; and he, too, might take him promptly back to Kairouan as the only solution of an un-Arabic dilemma.
In the meantime there was nothing to do but settle himself as comfortably as possible and wait for daylight. He lowered himself to the floor, leaning against a well and laying his wrist against the cold stone to soothe its hot aching.
At once, as his body relaxed into some degree of comfort, his mind raced back to the hotel, and painted pictures of the night's events: Dancherman cold in bed—the writhing thing beside him that crawled over the stiffened limbs—the smirk on the face of the snake-charmer as he sold him the gunny-sack with its deadly burden—the house-boy at the hotel with his stupid wonderment at sight of the foppishly dressed tourist carrying a filthy gunny-sack in his hand.
And through the shadowy memories wove the sinuous bodies of snakes; and back of them again laced tenuous figures with splayed necks, darting their forked tongues and striking out.
But this was delirium! His wrist—the pain of it—stealing his reason for a few minutes. He clamped his teeth shut and waved away the faces and figures that swam before his eyes. But the twining forms of the cobras persisted. No matter how tightly he closed his eyes he could still see the crawling, sluggish reptiles with their cold eyes and lightning tongues.
What would it feel like to be bitten by one? What had Dancherman felt when the needle points sank in his flesh? Probably as though his veins had been opened and molten iron poured in! Then—his face blackened by the poison, lying cold in bed beside the writhing cobra.
How dark in this ghastly pit! Black with the hopeless darkness that must belong to the blind. And quiet! The abysmal silence began to weigh on his nerves. It was so noiseless that he could hear the rasp of shirt fabric against coat as his chest rose and fell with his breathing. He moved his leg slightly, and could distinctly hear the rustle of cloth. A dry, scaly kind of rustling! Like the noise of
His heart pounded in his ears as he strained to hear. It had seemed for an instant as though he could still hear the rustling after his leg had stopped moving! Like the rasping of a scaly body on the stone of the floor!
Logic instantly came to his relief. It could not be a cobra he had heard. Snakes hunt for sun-warmed rocks, not chill, lightless pits. And with the sheer walls, no serpent could den here. Impossible! He was imagining things.
Nevertheless he remained facing toward the spot where he thought he had heard the sound, bent forward as though he would force aside the curtain of blackness and see if a snake were really there.
A dry, leisurely rasping sounded out from another corner of the pit. He whirled to listen, leaning his weight full on his broken wrist in the heedless intensity of his effort to hear. The noise continued, stopped for an instant, came again as though nearer to him.
Like an answering whisper, the rustling was renewed in the corner where he had first thought he heard it. From each side sounded the rasping as of dry, cold scales on rough stone. And from each side the sound seemed to come ever closer.
Another murmurous rustle scraped his ears—and another. From all directions came the whisper of fat, thick coils looping over the rock of the floor—converging as they moved dully to see what strange thing had fallen into their home.
There must be dozens, scores of them. And all moving with that faint scratchy sound as they neared him. He drew up his knees, and huddled into his corner for fear at any moment he might feel one of the heavy coils wound around his leg.
His heart thudded in his throat until a little sheet of red spurted before his eyes at every throb. One man, defenseless and alone, in a pit that was literally carpeted with writhing cobras!
Nearer sounded the rustling. As though the darkness had suddenly been lifted, he could fairly see the slowly narrowing circle of snakes closing in on him. Nearer. . . .
The nerve ends in his skin jerked and fluttered as he felt in anticipation the contact of the reptiles. Soon, now, soon—and they would be touching him.
He put his hand to the floor to brace his trembling body—and cried aloud as his fingers came squarely down on a round, cold thing. Consciousness began to fade, till he was jerked back to alertness by the thought that he must not faint.
As the contact burned again and again in remembrance, it occurred to him that it might not have been a snake, but merely a ridge in the cold, smooth rock; he had not been bitten, and the thing, whatever it was, had not moved. But for no reward could he have forced his fingers to explore there again. The thought that a cobra might be coiled motionless within a foot of him was less horrible than the chance of deliberately touching one with his bare hand!
The dry rasping was louder now, and nearer. From all directions he could hear it. . . .
His leg jerked out spasmodically as there was the feeling of something brushing slowly against it. That would not do. He must not do that! His only hope—if any hope was left him—lay in remaining as motionless as the stone itself. He had read that somewhere. A motionless body is never bitten by a snake.
Something moved across his ankle, as though a section of rope were being pulled over it. Through his thin sock he could feel every flowing of chill, serpentine muscle. Sweat poured from his body, but he stayed quiet.
The snake curled up against the warmth of his leg. And as minute after minute ticked by, Weiss held himself motionless though the hair of his scalp prickled and each repressed breath caught in his throat.
From every part of the pit came the continued rasping of dry, cold bodies looping over the rock floor. Like the far-off rustling of leaves, it was. The rustling of leaves in pitchy blackness! And in the center of the deadly circle, he held himself as quiet as the rock against which he leaned.
The strain was too much for any
human will. With the cobras all
about him, and the weight of one actually
resting against his leg—he began to
break! An instant more, and though he
should be bitten a score of times for it—he
would have to move. All over his
body his muscles were twitching with
agonized desire for blind, senseless
action.
His hands, clenched in his lap, were touched by something cold and heavy that crawled over them and came to coiled rest on his waist. . . .
The thread of control was snapped. Screaming, he lashed out with his fists, battering the rock floor with his bare hands as far as he could reach. He could feel a dozen needle points sunk into his flesh. . . .
Without a sound he fell forward on his face and lay still.
It was so that Achmed and the vacationing cattle-man—sent out by Dan-cherman to bring him back quietly and avoid a scandal—found him in the red light of daybreak.
Noosing the tow-rope of the car around one of the stiffened arms, they raised the body of Weiss from the pit. As they laid it out on the ground, both drew back with a shudder from the staring, twisted face, and Achmcd quickly covered it with his burnoose.
"It must be someone else.'" marveled the cattle-man. "Weiss didn't have white hair."
"It is Weiss," said Achmed. "But—changed!"
"How could he have died—like that? Cobra bite?"
"No. As you see, his face—though not pretty—is unblackened by the poison. Besides, in the memory of man, there have been no cobras around here."
"But the one Dancherman threw out of his bed"
"Brought up from far, far south by the charmer," said Achmed. "There are no cobras in this land, my friend. Unless"—he shrugged—"unless there are those most powerful ones of the imagination. . . ."
"Nonsense!" protested the rancher. "It takes more than imagination to kill a full-grown man!"
Incredulous, he searched minutely for signs of cobra bite. The body was absolutely unmarked!
"You see!" said Achmed. "It was too dark, and he was too much alone with the memory of what he had done. . . ."
Again he shrugged, and he raised his eyes from the huddled figure toward the throneroom of Allah.
Whether at Naishápúr or Babylon,
Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.