species making an unprovoked attack upon human beings. One case happened within my own knowledge. A party of Kaffir children were playing near some bushes, about a hundred yards from the huts where they lived, when they caught sight of a cobra creeping towards them. Being aware of its venomous character, they ran away from the bushes with all speed into the road, where, thinking themselves secure, they slackened their speed. Suddenly one of the children uttered a piercing scream. Unperceived, the cobra had followed him, and bitten his heel; in a quarter of an hour the child was dead.
The dingy yellow cobra of the warmer and more northerly parts of Central South Africa, often to be seen in the mapani-woods of the Sibanani plains, exhibits the murderous propensity of its race in another fashion.[1] It will choose a spot where two mapani-trees with their bushy tops over-arch a track by which the wild cattle pass on their way to drink, and rolling its tail firmly round a bough, will let its body hang suspended, straight as an assegai, ready to make its attack at the proper instant. Unlike the green or the black species, its colour is so nearly identical with the tints of the foliage that it is very likely to be unobserved, and, consequently, Europeans may be exposed to a danger against which it is difficult to guard.
Just after my rencontre with the cobra in the glen, on the same day, one of the black boys, who
- ↑ I use the term “murderous propensity” advisedly, as the cobra is quite unable to devour what it has thus destroyed.
