THE TERRIBLE. 



master, thinking he had run away, sent another 

 negro to look after him ; this negro went to the 

 place directed, and found the man quite dead, and 

 swollen up to a hideous size. He was bitten in 

 two places, and death must have been instantane- 

 ous, as he was not more than three feet from the 

 sluice. They supposed that it must have been a 

 bush-master that had killed him. The couni- 

 couchi, or bush-master, is the most dreaded of all 

 the South American snakes, and, as his name im- 

 plies, he roams absolute master of the forest. 

 They will not fly from man, like all other snakes, 

 but will even pursue and attack him. They are 

 fat, clumsy-looking snakes, about four feet long, 

 and nearly as thick as a man's arm; their mouth 

 is unnaturally large, and their fangs are from one 

 to three inches in length. They strike with im- 

 mense force ; and a gentleman who had examined 

 a man after having been struck in the thigh and 

 died, told the narrator that the wound was as if 

 two four-inch nails had been driven into the flesh. 

 As the poison oozes out from the extremity of the 

 fang, any hope of being cured after a bite is small, 

 as it is evident that no external application could 

 have any immediate effect on a poison deposited 

 an inch and a half or two inches below the sur- 

 face ; the instantaneousness of the death depends 

 upon whether any large artery is wounded or 

 not. 



The same traveller records the following shock- 

 ing story about a very deadly snake, called the 

 manoota, that infests the borders of the Lake of 

 Valencia, in Venezuela:— 



"An American we met related an anecdote of 



this snake, which, if true, was very frightful. He 



had gone in a canoe one night with a father and 



son, intending to shoot deer next morning on one 



253 



