314 THE REPTILES OE EGYPT. 
posterior part of the body ; underparts yellowish : (c) uniform brown above with a 
vellowish-brown head ; underparts yellowish white, but each ventral more or less 
marked with dark brown, completely involving the 4th to the 23rd ventral ; caudals 
margined with dusky brown : (d) uniform brown above, marked with widely scattered 
yellow spots, generally involving one scale and irregularly alternate, in about twelve 
series ; under surface rich yellowish, each ventral margined with dusky brown ; 12th to 
24th ventral dark purplish brown : (e) pale brown above, slightly paler on the head, 
spotted irregularly with dark brown, a spot generally involving only one scale, the 
broad yellow transverse band on the latter part of the body, and one on the tail ; 
ventrals yellowish white, margined with dusky, the nineteenth to the twenty-eighth 
purplish brown. 
In the first specimen yet recorded from Medina, Arabia, the colour is pale brown, with 
dark markings tending to be arranged more or less in transverse bands on the posterior 
part of the body ; but besides the deep black collar there is a broad yellowish band 
anterior to it across the neck, with a central black spot and a black spot on the side 
of the neck, markings which are never present in Egyptian cobras, but which from 
their position foreshadow, as it were, the spectacle of N~. tripudians. 
The Egyptian cobra attains to 1790 millim. (i. e. practically G feet), of which the 
tail measures 245 millim. 
It is very common in Lower and Upper Egypt, and is found both on the alluvium 
and on the margin of the desert. At Maryut I met with it in barley-fields not far 
distant from the Lake, and, at Gizeh, on the margins of the backwaters left by the 
retiring Nile. It is prevalent on the moist fields of the alluvium and occurs close to 
the sea at Beltim. It occasionally enters human habitations, and I have seen a 
specimen that had been captured in a house in Cairo. 
It is distributed over Northern Africa from Egypt to Morocco, along the Nile valley 
southwards to Mozambique, and from the latter area northwards to Somaliland. It is 
also present in Southern Palestine and in the North-western Province of Arabia 
(Medina). 
Its food consists largely of batrachians, more especially toads, but it lives also upon 
rats and mice. It takes freely to water, crossing broad streams. As a rule it is not 
aggressive. 
Some of the members of this genus, like Sepedon, are remarkable for the habit 
they have of ejecting their saliva by an act of forcible expiration when irritated. 
Pliny 1 has described the ptyas, or spitting-serpent, and iElian 2 doubtless referred to 
the same habit when he describes the Libyan asp as blinding with its breath those 
who looked at it. Prosper Alpinus 3 , writing about 14 centuries later, says that there 
were three kinds of asp in Egypt, and that the spitting-snake jpti/as was so called 
1 Nat. Hist. 28. 6. 18 ; 31. 6. 3. 2 Hist. Anim. iii. 33. 
3 Rerum -Egypt, lib. iv. cap. iv. (1735, 4to). 
