WATCHING ADDERS 89 



sun shining into its round, lidless, brilliant eyes is 

 hardly to be believed. The immobility which we 

 note at first does not continue long ; watch the adder 

 lying peacefully in the sun, and you will see that at 

 intervals of a very few minutes, and sometimes as 

 often as once a minute, he quietly changes his position. 

 Now he draws his concentric coils a little closer, now 

 spreads them more abroad; by -and -by the whole 

 body is extended to a sinuous band, then disposed in 

 the form of a letter S, or a simple horseshoe figure, 

 and sometimes the head rests on the body and 

 sometimes on the ground. The gentle, languid move- 

 ments of the creature changing his position at in- 

 tervals are like those of a person in a reclining hot 

 bath, who occasionally moves his body and limbs to 

 renew and get the full benefit of the luxurious sen- 

 sation. 



That the two adders could see me when I stood 

 over them, or at a distance of three or four yards, or 

 even more, is likely; but it is certain that they did 

 not regard me as a living thing, or anything to be 

 disturbed at, but saw me only as a perfectly motionless 

 object which had grown imperceptibly on their vision, 

 and was no more than a bush, or stump, or tree. 

 Nevertheless, I became convinced that always after 

 standing for a time near them my presence produced 

 a disturbing effect. It is, perhaps, the case that we 

 are not all contained within our visible bodies, but 

 have our own atmosphere about us something of 



