SNAKES AND SCORPIONS

Auckland Star, Volume LIV, Issue 148, 23 June 1923, Page 17

SNAKES AND SCORPIONS

THE SERPENT-CHARMER OF LUXOR The charmer's name is Moussa. He drove with us from Luxor (writes a special correspondent of the "Times"), sitting on the box seat of one of the carriages with a basket in his hand, which, he sufficiently satisfied us, was empty; a little man and swarthy, with a bristling, untrimmed moustache, leanI faced, aJid quick of movement; as, perhaps, you have to be in dealing with cobras and scorpions and such. l>ressed in black with a white turban on his head, carrying a longish cane in his hand, he led the way—we live English following— amid the rubbish heaps and piles of broken masonry and old mud bricks which litter the dusty plain about the Temple of Karnak. As he walked he harangued the world at large, chanting, in a highpitched monotone, texts, we were told, from the Koran, and powerful incantations taught him by his grandfather. A great man must his grandfather have been. He learned all his lore from Hakim iSyed .Suleiman himself, a Sheikh sn potent that every snake and scorpion in Egypt knows and trembles at his name to-day. Now and again Moussa stopped to exhort some likely-looking pile of dust and stones with especial earnestness. He would even thump it with his stick, and, in tho name of Suleiman, adjure whatever obscene creatures might be in hiding to come out. The first two or three such piles we drew blank. Then, "He smells something, , ' said the interpreter. Calling our attention to a particular hole among heaped bits of masonry, the little man attacked the orifice from afar off with the point of his stick, thrusting it angrily, chipping the sides, stirring the dust before it. Then, advancing gingerly and with his flowing sleeves pushed back to leave his lean arms bare to the shoulder, reaching out. ho picked delicately out of that dust, by the extreme tip of its tail, a wriggling scorpion. IN SULEIMAN'S NAME. No; it was not sleight of hand. The scorpion was there where he found it, though how it may have got there is another matter. It was not a large one, but large enough-—some four or five inches long over all, a greenish-yellow, semi-translucent, horrid thing. For a while Moussa played with it for our benefit, letting it do its best to sting the calloused tip of his thumb, and making it sit motionless at the word of com- | mand in Suleiman's dreaded name. Then i he placed it on a stone, whence it i promptly scuttled away. Again he caught ; it and placed it there, drew a ring round ' it with his finger, and marked a cross ! before it, and once more adjured it In i Suleiman's name to stay still. And it ! stayed, even though he" beat the stone i close by with his stick. i More scorpions followed, with the same pantomime in every case, till scorpions palled upon us. We wanted bigger game

and clamoured for snakes —the larger and more venomous the better. Well, he inquired, where would we like him to look for them? So we directed him along, the old mud-brick wall of the Romans, full on the face of which the sun was beating. And the snakes came. 1 First a thin grey snake perhaps three and a-half feet long was hauled struggling out of a hole in the old wall and flung upon the sand at our feet. We were 1 assured that it was abominably poison- I ous; but from the shape of its head it | looked as harmless as a grass snake at j home. I Again he smelled something; smelled it from afar! And presently before a group of three holes close together in the wall he stopped in a very fury of exhortation. Every charm that his grandfather ever knew must surely have been invoked as the little man threatened and i commanded and thrashed at the wall ! with his stick, while ten feet above a I pair of little owls sitting on a ledge in the wall blinked down in astonishment and bobbed their heads at us ridiculously. A STRUGGLING COBRA. After thrusting his stick into one hole after another, he conveyed to us that the three were connected inside the wall; and the snake, he gave us to understand, was dodging him from one to another. At last he seemed to have cornered his prey, and, reaching his bare arm almost to tho shoulder deep into one of the black openings (I wouldn't have done it for all the money in the world), he drew out, the reptile doing its best to resist, a struggling cobra getting on for five feet long. It was certainly a formidable looking thing as it slid this way and that over the sand or stopped to rear its head and expand its hood like a uraeus of one of the old Egyptian kings come to life. To the creature, thus upreared, its black tongue flickering in and out of its narrow slit of a mouth. Moussa. stooping down before it, slowly reached out his" hand. Very gradually, alnipst imperceptibly, he brought it nearer and nearer to that wicked-looking head until it was but six inches away, plainly within striking distance. Then gently, as if in exhausted, surrender, the serpent reached forward and softly laid its head in the upturned ' palm. It was an extraordinarily dramatic' curtain to the play. ' \ And are they really wild creatures | that he thus discovers for the tourist? You will hear many stories, various theories. But day after day he goes, now here, now there, and never ia'U \o produce both scorpions and snakes. People have told mc how they took him out into the desert and he found them there as easily as in the familiar mud brick wall at Karnak. Is all Egypt, then, but his own private snake-house or serpent-warren ? Has he tame conras and scorpions and what not laid down in every hole in all the wilderness? I do not know; but it is an unpleasant thought. At all events, as his averaee tip from the thrilled tourists is probably one pound » day, Moussa makes . money_while tn« , season lasts. „ '[