ROUGHING IT IN SOUTHERN INDIA 59 



whereon they may be lying, so wondrously coloured are 

 they — grey blotched here and there with green and brown, 

 exactly like moss or lichen ; hence their safety. I remem- 

 ber a friend of ours having the skin of one dried to make 

 chair covers for his English drawing-room ! This was over 

 nineteen feet long, and not reckoned out of the way. 

 Beautiful, I own, but not to my fancy for daily use. 



Pythons need to be large, considering the size of their 

 prey. F. shot one of these which was very nearly dead 

 when he came upon it. The horns of a deer were sticking 

 out of its mouth, the rest of the body having been swal- 

 lowed and partially digested without the bones being at 

 all crushed ; but the horns gave the snake trouble, and it 

 was choking, so that to shoot it was merciful. Another 

 time he found a cat — a black cat — in the stomach of a 

 python ; neither in this case were any bones broken, the 

 prey being always swallowed whole. Whether a python 

 would attack a human being I do not know ; I never 

 heard of such a thing happening. 



Other non- venomous sorts, such as the common rat- 

 snakes, grow pretty long ; they never interfere with people, 

 and their bite would only be in self-defence if roughly 

 handled. 



Once we were living temporarily in the more habitable 

 part of a ruinous old bungalow whilst a new one was 

 building for us, and it happened that some friends passing 

 through the place, and staying with us, were obliged to 

 occupy the other part. During the night they were kept 

 awake by strange sounds proceeding from under the warped, 

 creaking floor — an incessant scuffling and squeaking — and 

 on investigation being made the next morning no less 

 than four and twenty rat-snakes, dead and alive, were 

 * counted ! All the latter were spared, thanks to their 

 usefulness in keeping down the army of rats that infested 

 the bungalow. Some glided away, some stayed coiled up 



