One
jadugar was especially remarkable. His head was crowned with a turban
of cobras. Expanding their hoods and raising their leaf-like dark green
heads, these cobras hissed furiously and so loudly that the sound was
audible a hundred paces off. Their "stings" quivered like lightning,
and their small eyes glittered with anger at the approach of every
passer-by. The expression, "the sting of a snake," is universal, but
it does not describe accurately the process of inflicting a wound. The
"sting" of a snake is perfectly harmless. To introduce the poison into
the blood of a man, or of an animal, the snake must pierce the flesh
with its fangs, not prick with its sting. The needle-like eye teeth of
a cobra communicate with the poison gland, and if this gland is cut out
the cobra will not live more than two days. Accordingly, the supposition
of some sceptics, that the bunis cut out this gland, is quite unfounded.
The term "hissing" is also inaccurate when applied to cobras. They do
not hiss. The noise they make is exactly like the death-rattle of a
dying man. The whole body of a cobra is shaken by this loud and heavy
growl.

Here we happened to be the witnesses of a fact which I relate exactly
as it occurred, without indulging in explanations or hypotheses of any
kind. I leave to naturalists the solution of the enigma.

Expecting to be well paid, the cobra-turbaned buni sent us word by a
messenger boy that he would like very much to exhibit his powers of
snake-charming. Of course we were perfectly willing, but on condition
that between us and his pupils there should be what Mr. Disraeli would
call a "scientific frontier."* We selected a spot about fifteen paces
from the magic circle. I will not describe minutely the tricks and
wonders that we saw, but will proceed at once to the main fact. With the
aid of a vaguda, a kind of musical pipe of bamboo, the buni caused all
the snakes to fall into a sort of cataleptic sleep. The melody that he
played, monotonous, low, and original to the last degree, nearly sent us
to sleep ourselves. At all events we all grew extremely sleepy without
any apparent cause. We were aroused from this half lethargy by our
friend Gulab-Sing, who gathered a handful of a grass, perfectly unknown
to us, and advised us to rub our temples and eyelids with it. Then the
buni produced from a dirty bag a kind of round stone, something like a
fish's eye, or an onyx with a white spot in the centre, not bigger tha