XIV 
SNAKES 
Mi 
natives of having stolen them for food, accused them 
of the theft. They stoutly denied the charge, and 
when my cook brought me several half-eaten onions 
from my store, I came to the conclusion that some 
animal or other had been the cunning marauder 
in both cases. The tooth-marks on the onions, 
however, were strange to me, but the natives were 
positive in their assertions that the indentations had 
been made by a snake. Curiously enough, some 
days later, I happened to be rummaging in my 
store, where I kept all my provisions and ivory, 
and chanced to pull out from among the other 
goods a large tusk, measuring some eight feet 
in length. Now the root of every tusk is hollow, 
and in this particular one the cavity was about two 
feet six inches long and about seven inches in 
diameter. Immediately I pulled it free from the 
stack, a snake, some seven feet in length, shot out of 
the hollow end of the tusk and slipped out of sight 
among the pile of packages. Calling my men 
together, I told them to prod with their sticks 
among the wares, and ere long they drove the 
reptile out into the open, where they beat it to death. 
The skin of this serpent, which the Angoni call 
lepinganombie, the Mwera, lebomah, was of a dark 
mottled grey colour. This particular species is most 
deadly and accounts for numbers of the natives’ 
cattle and goats. 
