If
You Fail To Seize Them, They Trickle Earthward Through The Tangle Like A
Thread Of Running Water.
He belonged to that common Italian kind which has no English
name - Germans call them Zornnatter, in allusion to their choleric
disposition. Most of them are quite ready to snap at the least
provocation; maybe they find it pays, as it does with other folks, to
assume the offensive and be first in the field, demanding your place in
the sun with an air of wrathful determination. Some of the big fellows
can draw blood with their teeth. Yet the jawbones are weak and one can
force them asunder without much difficulty; whereas the bite of a
full-grown emerald lizard, for instance, will provide quite a novel
sensation. The mouth closes on you like a steel trap, tightly
compressing the flesh and often refusing to relax its hold. In such
cases, try a puff of tobacco. It works! Two puffs will daze them; a
fragment of a cigar, laid in the mouth, stretches them out dead. And
this is the beast which, they say, will gulp down prussic acid as if it
were treacle.
But snakes vary in temperament as we do, and some of these Zamenis
serpents are as gentle and amiable as their cousin the Aesculap snake.
My friend of this afternoon could not be induced to bite. Perhaps he was
naturally mild, perhaps drowsy from his winter sleep or ignorant of the
ways of the world; perhaps he had not yet shed his milk teeth. I am
disposed to think that he forgot about biting because I made a
favourable impression on him from the first. He crawled up my arm. It
was pleasantly warm, but a little too dark; soon he emerged again and
glanced around, relieved to discover that the world was still in its old
place. He was not clever at learning tricks. I tried to make him stand
on his head, but he refused to stiffen out. Snakes have not much sense
of humour.
Lizards are far more companionable. During two consecutive summers I had
a close friendship with a wall-lizard who spent in my society certain of
his leisure moments - which were not many, for he always had an
astonishing number of other things on hand. He was a full-grown male,
bejewelled with blue spots. A fierce fighter was Alfonso (such was his
name), and conspicuous for a most impressive manner of stamping his
front foot when impatient. Concerning his other virtues I know little,
for I learnt no details of his private life save what I saw with my
eyes, and they were not always worthy of imitation. He was a polygamist,
or worse; obsessed, moreover, by a deplorable habit of biting off the
tails of his own or other people's children. He went even further. For
sometimes, without a word of warning, he would pounce upon some innocent
youngster and carry him in his powerful jaws far away, over the wall,
right out of my sight.
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