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  Roger looked back again. ‘I see him - Gog - looking through the bushes - no, I don’t - yes I do - no I don’t.’

  ‘Get hold of yourself,’ Hal said. ‘Your nerves are all in a tangle. With that bullet in him Gog is still running. He’s probably miles away by this time.’

  But he wasn’t too sure about it As they entered their cabin and flopped down on the camp beds to rest, he began to wonder. Suppose the kid had really seen something. Suppose Gog had followed them and now knew where to find them. Gog believed that they had slaughtered his family.

  They had put a bullet in him. He had been too tough to kill, but perhaps the bullet was causing him terrible pain and added to his determination to take revenge. Perhaps they had not seen the last of Gog.

  Chapter 5

  Pythons are like that

  Roger was restless. Every time he began to doze off he saw an angry black face in the bushes and a hairy arm five hundred feet long reaching all the way across the clearing to knock him senseless.

  He woke and worried. Not just because he was afraid of Gog But also because he was sorry for Gog. The great beast had lost his loved ones. Then Tieg had made matters worse. Now Gog, wounded and suffering, had become a deadly enemy. Half crazy with pain, he was raging through the forest ready to kill the first human he saw.

  ‘Hal,’ Roger said. ‘Wake up.’

  ‘Go to sleep.’

  ‘Listen, Hal. We’ve got to do something.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Get that bullet out of him.’

  It was not the reply Hal had expected. But it was just like Roger to plan how to help an animal rather than escape from it ‘k.

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ Hal said. ‘How can you make friends with a beast that is bent on murdering you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ admitted Roger. ‘But we’ve got to do it, somehow. And you’ve got to fire Tieg.’

  ‘Unfortunately, we can’t do that. He’s under contract. We had to guarantee to keep him on until we’re done with our job in these mountains. But there’s one thing I can do, perhaps. Relieve him of his revolver.’

  Roger laughed. ‘Now there’s something I’d like to see. I suppose you’ll just say, ‘Pretty please, Mr Tieg, I’d like to have your gun.”

  Hal smiled. ‘Something like that,’ he said.

  ‘And if he doesn’t fork it over?’

  ‘Then I’ll have to try gentle persuasion.’

  Joro burst into the room.

  ‘Python, bwana.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the lake.’

  ‘Keep your eye on it. We’ll be right out.’

  Ringling Circus wanted a python. And here was one almost at their front door. Their weariness was promptly forgotten and they ran out to the edge of the lake.

  They looked in vain for the python. Joro pointed. There.’

  They had expected to see the longest animal in Africa. All they saw was a nose. It projected above the surface just far enough to allow the creature to breathe.

  It reminded them of the great serpent of the Amazon jungle, the anaconda. It was a first cousin of the python. They both belonged to the boa family. But the anaconda was a water snake, while the python was supposed to be a land snake. Yet they both had this habit of lying doggo in the water close to shore, ready to leap out and grab any animal that might come to drink.

  ‘How do we get it out of there?’ Roger wondered. ‘Lasso it? Use a net?’

  ‘It would go down before we could get a rope or a net on it,’ Hal said.

  ‘How could it go down? It has to stay up to breathe.’

  ‘No. It can stay under and hold its breath for a good twenty minutes. In the meantime it could swim away under water and we would have no idea where to find it. We won’t have much luck using force. But perhaps we can give it a good reason to come out.’

  ‘What do you mean? Do you think you can argue with a python?’

  ‘Yes. If we have another animal to help us.’ Hal’s eye roamed around the clearing. He spotted a duiker antelope grazing near the edge of the woods.

  Mali, one of his men, was carrying a lasso. ‘See if you can snag that duiker,’ Hal said.

  Mali roped the unsuspecting little antelope without difficulty.

  ‘Bring it over here - close to the water,’ Hal said.

  Mali dragged the bucking, prancing little creature until it stood on the shore close to the waiting python. Mali himself disappeared into the bushes, still holding the end of the

  line.

  There was a sudden surge of water as the snake with head raised and jaws open shot towards its prey.

  ‘Haul in,’ shouted Hal.

  Mali hauled the trembling little creature into the safety of the bushes and let it go. A dozen men descended upon the great snake. Wet and slippery, it slithered through their fingers and dived into a hole. The men were disappointed.

  ‘Never mind,’ Hal said. ‘We’ll get it yet. It must have its nest down there. Sooner or later it will come out again. Be ready to grab it’

  They stood and waited - ten, twenty, thirty minutes.

  The cook suddenly had an idea. He went to the provision truck and came back with a sprig of garlic. ‘In my village,’ the black man said, ‘they used to say that snakes liked garlic. They just can’t stay away from it’ He put down the garlic at the edge of the hole. ‘That will bring him out.’

  Hal was too wise to laugh at such notions. This was only one of many native superstitions.

  Another was that the python is sacred. Many tribes worship it as a sort of god. If you kill a python there will be no rain and your crops will die.

  Another notion is that a python must have its tail locked around a tree before it throws its coils about you. Naturalists know that this is not so - many pythons have attacked men and animals on the plains where there were no trees.

  Another common idea is that the snake uses its tongue as a paintbrush and covers its victim with saliva so it will slip down more easily. Actually the tongue is too small for such a job. It would be like trying to paint a barn with a toothbrush.

  The snake has two small bumps underneath and is supposed to press these into its victim’s nostrils so that it cannot breathe. This is not true, but the truth is more strange. The two bumps are the remains of feet. Some millions of years ago snakes walked.

  One more popular idea is that no snake dies before sundown. This is not the case, but there is some reason for such a superstition as the boys were soon to find out.

  The rainbow, in the traditions of some tribes, is an enormous python coiled around the globe, and only the most powerful witch doctors can keep it from squeezing the world to death.

  The garlic didn’t work. But something was working. Hal, standing about twenty feet away from the hole, began to feel the earth moving beneath him. Hal was not surprised, because this part of Africa, peppered with volcanoes, was subject to violent earthquakes.

  A sudden upheaval made him stagger off to more solid

  ground.

  What a strange earthquake that was. No one else seemed to have felt anything. No tree showed the least tremor. The earthquake had been under him and nowhere else.

  Chapter 6

  Wrestling match

  The earth squirmed and broke and there was the thrashing tail of the python. It seemed as if the snake, instead of being attracted by the garlic, was trying to get as far away from it as possible.

  The tail was beginning to go down again. Hal grabbed it and shouted to the men to come and help.

  They took hold and began to pull. But a snake knows very well what to do in a case like that. It braces itself against the walls of the hole. The muscles swell and turn rigid, locking the body firmly in place.

  But if the snake could play tricks, Hal could do the same. He knew the snake would try to go deeper and escape. To do so, it must release its grip on the sides of the hole.

  Don’t keep up a steady pull,’ Hal said. ‘Now, let up a bit.’
The men stopped pulling. Immediately the python loosened its hold and started down. ‘Now, pull!’ Hal shouted. The men heaved back and the snake instead of going forward as planned, lost ten or twelve inches. Once more it gripped the sides and could be pulled no farther.

  Again Hal said, ‘Let up.’ The men stopped pulling. The snake relaxed its hold and started down. ‘Pull,’ Hal ordered, and out came another foot or so of snake.

  Again and again the stratagem was repeated. But now there was a new difficulty. The more of the writhing body that was pulled out, the more difficult it was to control the struggling reptile.

  More men were called to help. Now the big snake had thirty men to reckon with. The contorting snake flung them back and forth, bruising them against the trees, shaking them off repeatedly - for the python has no convenient handles by which it may be held.

  Presently out came a bulge: something the serpent had swallowed and had not yet digested. Then another bulge. Evidently the creature had breakfasted well that morning.

  And now the head itself appeared. It was about half the size of either of the bulges. How could a snake swallow something twice the size of its own head?

  The secret lay in. its jaws. They are not hinged as ours are. They are connected by something like elastic bands. They can be stretched apart to take in an animal the size of a calf.

  Hal and Roger had previously seen a python that had swallowed a red deer - all but the horns. They projected weirdly from the sides of the mouth. But this time the bulges were smaller, only about a foot in diameter, and their nature remained a mystery.

  With a violent twist the snake threw off the men who had locked their arms around its neck and turned on one of its enemies with jaws agape.

  The man stumbled and fell. The snake acted swiftly. Its teeth closed on the man’s bare shoulder.

  The python has no poison fangs. But the sharp powerful teeth can inflict a serious wound. Its long teeth are as sharp as needles. They are curved in like fish-hooks so that once they have taken hold they do not let go.

  The men forgot the tail and tried to rescue their companion from the snake’s jaws. At once the neglected tail swung round, beating down several men, then coiled about the body of the man who had been bitten. The man was Toto, one of Hal’s best. He fought bravely but could do little since his arms were pinioned to his sides.

  Every time he breathed out. the coils tightened. That is

  the constrictor’s favourite method of killing. Often it does not break any bones, but merely squeezes more and more tightly so that the victim cannot breathe. When breathing has stopped the heart also will soon stop.

  But don’t believe it if someone tells you that a constrictor cannot break bones if it wants to. A circus performer was killed by a seventeen-foot snake and was found afterwards to have bones broken in eighty-four places.

  If the snake succeeded in squeezing all the life out of Toto it would then proceed to swallow him. Whether it could do so would depend upon the size of the snake and the size of the man. There are hundreds of proven cases of the swallowing of humans by members of the boa family.

  The boa constrictor, which grows only to a length of some twelve feet, cannot do it. But it is not impossible for the great anaconda or the python. A python more than thirty feet in length swallowed a grown East Indian woman. A boy fourteen years old was swallowed by a snake eighteen feet long. When a Burmese disappeared his friends searched for him, found nothing but his slippers, and near by a gorged python twenty-five feet long. Upon opening it they found the body of their companion.

  And yet a python is not a vicious creature. It almost never makes trouble unless it is attacked. It is easily tamed and many an African keeps a pet python in the house to rid the place of rats and other vermin.

  Hal was already trying to pull the great jaws apart and the sharp teeth were cutting his fingers. Roger ran to the supply wagon and came back with a crowbar.

  ‘Good!’ cried Hal, seizing the bar and forcing it between the great teeth. Two men helped him pry the jaws open and free the bloody shoulder. Others had seized the tail and were uncoiling the snake from Toto’s body. Toto knew nothing of all this. He had fainted.

  Roger’s crowbar did the trick. The jaws separated and the uncoiled serpent fell away.

  But if the men thought the snake was exhausted they were mistaken. Before they realized what was happening the python plunged into one of the holes. It might stay down for hours, or even for days.

  Big Tieg had been standing safely in the background. Now he saw his chance to be a hero. He came striding in among the men, who stood no higher than his shoulders. His great yellow moustache whipped about in the breeze, his glass eye stared coldly at the men, and his other eye fixed itself scornfully upon Hal.

  ‘You’ve made a pretty botch of it, haven’t you,’ he said.

  ‘You could have done better?’ Hal inquired.

  ‘Naturally. You seem to forget that I am the guide of this expedition. This is no job for boys.’

  ‘If you have any plan let’s hear it,’ Hal said. ‘The snake is frightened now. Heaven knows how long it’ll stay down. If you know how to get it up, go to it’

  ‘Simple,’ Tieg said. ‘Men, get some brush and put it down that hole.’ The men obeyed. ‘Now set fire to the brush.’ The fire was soon blazing fiercely. ‘No snake can stand that. It will come out the other hole. All of you, stand close around that hole and grab it when it comes out’

  The men closed in around the hole. Perhaps Tieg was right. The python, dreading the fire, would surely try to escape by this exit

  No one happened to notice that Tieg did not join the men around the hole where the snake was expected to emerge. He stood at a safe distance by the other hole where the fire burned.

  He was taken completely by surprise when straight up through the flames shot a great yellow head drawing after it a writhing black-and-brown body with two lumps. Like a thunderbolt it struck Tieg in the chest with its nose, tough as a battering ram, and threw its coils around him.

  Tieg in a panic drew his revolver and fired into the creature’s open mouth. The bullet passed up through the head. The snake fell away and the thirty-foot body twisted into knots in the death agony.

  Hal faced Tieg. ‘I’ll take that gun,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You knew very well we wanted to take that snake alive. You got scared and killed it. That’s the second time you’ve gummed things up. There’s a gorilla in the woods with a bullet in him because you lost your nerve. Now you can give me that gun.’

  Tieg’s glass eye bored a hole through Hal’s head while the other eye studied him from hair to boots and up again.

  ‘You impudent young whipper-snapper,’ he said slowly. If you want the gun, why don’t you take it?’

  His height was several inches more than Hal’s six feet and his cockatoo hair made him seem even taller. His shoulders were broader and his weight was greater by about fifty pounds.

  But Hal, though only nineteen, was taller and stronger than his own father and his muscles were hardened by constant use. He looked much less formidable than the man with the great yellow moustache. His men pressed in, ready to back him up.

  Tieg laughed. ‘You’ll need all the help you can get before I get done with you.’

  Hal motioned to the others to stand back. ‘If I have to take you on I’ll do it alone,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want to fight you. I only want the gun. There’s no reason we can’t be friends. But we can’t get along if you shoot every animal we want to take alive. Now, give me the gun.’

  ‘I’ll give you something but it won’t be the gun,’ Tieg said, and landed a blow in Hal’s midriff that made him stagger.

  Tieg, encouraged by this success, lunged forward. Hal with the lake behind him could go back no farther. He stepped to one side, tripped Tieg with his foot and sent him flying into the lake.

  Tieg disappeared completely. When he came up, dripping and furious, his moustache dr
ooped like a wet dishrag and his formerly erect hair was plastered down on his scalp. The laughter of the men made him more angry.

  ‘I’ll get you for this,’ he raged, and came at his opponent like a runaway locomotive. This time Hal did not dodge. He used a bit of the karate that he had learned in Japan. He stooped under Tieg’s fists, seized his ankles, and sent him soaring through the air to land head down in the python hole in the midst of the flames. Tieg’s wet clothes sent up a column of steam.

  Hal pulled him out of the hole and removed the gun from his holster. Tieg’s adventure in water and fire had taken all the fight out of him.

  ‘Better go and change your clothes,’ Hal said. Tieg got up and stumbled off towards the cabin.

  Chapter 7

  Another battle lost

  Joro slashed off the head of the dead snake with one stroke of his bush knife.

  ‘We make medicine out of that,’ he said.

  Hal was quite willing to let the men use the dead snake as they pleased. They could grind the skull into a powder and sell the powder to the medicine men.

  The joints of the backbone could be used by village women as a necklace to strengthen the throat - or as a belt to cure stomach-ache. In some African countries a string of python bones was supposed to protect the wearer against snakebite.

  Serpent superstition goes back a long way. Moses set up an image of a Brazen Serpent that was supposed to have healing power. For five centuries it was worshipped as a sort of god. The Greek god of healing, Asklepios, carried a carved serpent wound around a staff. It is still the symbol of the medical profession.

  Even today ‘snake medicine’ is sold in China. It is supposed to be a cure for insanity, convulsions, epilepsy, poor sight, colds, sore throat, malaria, earache, toothache, deafness, arthritis, and rheumatism. In Guatemala hot snake fat is used as a poultice for colds. Snake oil is well known in Puerto Rico.

  Viper flesh was used as a medicine in France until 1884, and before that in London as a cure for the plague.