| THE SERPENT-CHARMER.
will tighten, and the forked red lightning of the tongue turn on the
younger wizard. The turbaned old sheik, seated against the wall,
watches with knit brows and a pipe extinguished and forgotten, and
his armed and inky-hued attendants await the denouement with shin-
ing eyeballs and parted lips of smothered excitement. Before this
crouching and watching troop of blackness, words of description fail
us, and the Thousand and One Nights are beggared—Aladdin's palace,
falling to ruin and guarded by the descendants of the descendants
of the Slave of the Lamp, might possibly furnish a simile for this
walled corridor and this buzz of black Afrites waiting. How the
charming itself is really done the doctors are not agreed, even set-
ting aside the juggler's trick of using only serpents of which the
poison-fangs have been removed, with a portion of the maxillary bone
to prevent new ones from growing, or the destruction of the poison-
glands themselves by excision and cautery. That these desiccated old
flute-players and these smooth-limbed young acolytes have some occult
power over this representative of the enemy of mankind, seems to
be beyond doubt ; and as their profession is nearly always hereditary,
it is all the more difficult to discover the origin of this mastery. The
genuineness of the constitutional peculiarity which they claim for
themselves, and which renders them secure from any injury, may be
doubted ; but they seem to possess a power beyond that of other
men in knowing when a serpent is anywhere concealed. Possibly
long practice enables them to distinguish the faint musky smell of
the animal, even at a considerable distance ; and the voice, the whis-
tling, and the sound of the musical instrument of the man, certainly
have a great power over the beast. Still more strange is the very
remarkable influence of the eye, " for even before any musical sound
has been employed, he governs and commands the reptiles by merely
fixing his gaze upon them." In India, the terrible cobra-de-capellos
even execute a sort of obedient dance before their masters, raising a
large part of their bodies from the ground and swaying from side to
side in time to the sounds of a wind instrument.
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