"Cobra" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in ruddy soft gold, worked and graven with exquisite art in the semblance of a two-headed cobra; inside the band was an inscription so worn and faint that Amber experienced some difficulty in deciphering the word RAO (king) in Devanagari, flanked by swastikas. Aside from the stone entirely, he speculated, the value of the ring as an antique would have ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... have been. It is supposed by the natives to lure travelers to itself by this bleating. Several varieties, when alarmed, emit a peculiar odor, by which the people become aware of their presence in a house. We have also the cobra ('Naia haje', Smith) of several colors or varieties. When annoyed, they raise their heads up about a foot from the ground, and flatten the neck in a threatening manner, darting out the tongue and retracting it with great velocity, while their fixed glassy eyes glare as if in anger. There ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... cannot vouch it, for one I had was cut short at one end) and both alike in shape and bigness; and it is said to move with either head foremost, indifferently; whence it is called by the Portuguese cobra-de-dos-cabesas, the ...
— A Voyage to New Holland • William Dampier
... and professor such natural history objects as presented themselves were examined—lizards among the rocks, a few snakes, harmless, and the poison-bearing cobra; but away from the river, birds were rare, save those of prey, and as to animals they were heard more than seen. A gazelle or two, little and graceful, bounded across the track, but it was at night that the howling of the jackals and the long, ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... which they have enjoyed such delicious thrills in the same company already. When Mr. HICHENS' characters get the sand in their eyes almost anything may be expected of them. Here he has given us a new version of the ancient scheme of two men and a woman, complicated in this instance by a cobra; the problem being, whether a doctor should cure his wife's lover of a snake-bite. More original is the longest story in the collection, one called "The Lost Faith," an affair of mental healing and love and crime too complex ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... melancholy-looking captain, who was named Indudu, perhaps because he or his father had longed to the Dudu regiment, crawled into the hut, whence presently emerged sounds not unlike those which once I heard when a ringhals cobra followed a hare that I had wounded into a hole, a muffled sound of struggling and terror. These ended in the sudden and violent appearance of Kaatje's fat and dishevelled form, followed by that ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... probably do. 'Phobia' would be more exact. I'm afraid of fools, and the chance that I have one working for me, here, affects me like having a cobra crawling around my bedroom in the dark. I want you to locate any who might be in a gang of new men I've had to hire, so that I can get ...
— Day of the Moron • Henry Beam Piper
... drawing. I must say, however, the resemblance to a snake is not very striking, unless to a cobra not found in America. It is also evident that it is not Mr. Bates's caterpillar, as that threw the head backwards so as to show the feet above, forming imitations ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... a streaming brow. "But I do say die. I do say die, Mr. Marrapit, and I damn well shall die if I go creepin' and crawlin' and hissin' much longer. It's 'ard—damn 'ard. I'm a gardener, I am; not a cobra." ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... hair of pure gold. Compare in this book: Princess Jahuran, p. 43, the Monkey Prince, p. 50, Sonahri Rani, p. 54, Jahur Rani, p. 93, Prince Dima-ahmad and Princess Atasa, Notes, p. 253. Also, Hira Bai, the cobra's daughter in Old Deccan Days, p. 35. So many princely heroes and heroines in European fairy tales are noteworthy for their dazzling golden hair that I will only mention one of them, Princess Golden-Hair, ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... rattle of certain snakes is supposed to act as a love-call. Snakes of different sexes appear to feel some affection for each other when confined together in cages. Romanes relates the interesting fact that when a cobra is killed, its mate is often found on the spot a day or two afterwards. Darwin cites an instance of the pairing in spring of a Chinese species of lizard, where the couples appear to have considerable fondness for one another. If one is captured, the other drops from the tree to ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... yet no one knew What plant it was; its stem and tendrils seemed Like emerald snakes, mottled and diamonded With azure mail and streaks of woven silver; 165 And all the sheaths that folded the dark buds Rose like the crest of cobra-di-capel, Until the golden eye of the bright flower, Through the dark lashes of those veined lids, ...disencumbered of their silent sleep, 170 Gazed like a star into the morning light. Its leaves ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... himself of an effectual weapon, and fled away with the gun. The offended blacks had discovered the guilty pair on the outskirts of Breeza Downs, and Oola's husband, with a company of braves, had attacked their gunya. Then—to quote Oola—'that feller husband throw spear at Wombo—hit Oola long-a COBRA (head) with NULLA NULLA. Him close-up carry off Oola. My word! Wombo catch him PHO PHO. Plenty quick husband belonging to me TUMBLE DOWN.' And ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... of ordeal, which borrows its more striking features from the department of natural history, is that in which the prisoner or witness is required to grope about for a trinket or small coin in a basket or jar already occupied by a lively cobra. Should the groper not be bitten, our courtly friend, Asirvadam, is satisfied there has been some mistake here, and gallantly begs the gentleman's pardon. To force the subject to swallow water, cup by cup, until it burst ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... kind of modality, and the only one we need consider, is that which is signified by some qualification of the predicate as to the degree of certainty with which it is affirmed or denied. Thus, 'The bite of the cobra is probably mortal,' is called a Contingent or Problematic Modal: 'Water is certainly composed of oxygen and hydrogen' is an Assertory or Certain Modal: 'Two straight lines cannot enclose a space' is a Necessary or Apodeictic Modal (the opposite being ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... the perils that await his master and mistress. First he saves them from being crushed by the falling limb of a banyan-tree, and then he drags them away from an arch which immediately after gives way. By and by, as they rest under a tree, the king falls asleep. A cobra creeps up to the queen, and Luxman kills it with his sword; but, as the owls had foretold, a drop of the cobra's blood falls on the queen's forehead. As Luxman licks off the blood, the king starts up, and, thinking that his vizier is kissing his wife, upbraids ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... any case, these precautions were totally unnecessary. The grounds, like those of any other private house after nightfall, seemed untenanted. Tommy had imagined a possible fierce watchdog. Albert's fancy ran to a puma, or a tame cobra. But they reached a shrubbery near the ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... court." At these words the poor girl went down to the river very sorrowful, for she saw no hope of escape, as her father was from home. As she knelt by the river-side, washing her saree and crying bitterly, some of her tears fell into the hole of an old Seven-headed Cobra, who lived on the river-bank. This Cobra was a very wise animal, and seeing the maiden, he put his head out of his hole, and said to her: "Little girl, why do you cry?" "Oh, sir," she answered, "I am very unhappy; for my father is from home, and my stepmother ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... Crystal, drawing her shoulders up, as if at the sight of a cobra in her path. "Why is Eddie coming to lunch? I did not ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller
... not our snowy birds of the Atlantic. We are lonesome out here, and the Albatross sweeps beside us, hooded like a cobra, an evil creature trying to hoodoo us, with owlish eyes set in a frame like ghastly ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... and fluent man had now become to Hogarth like manna, or rather a vice, like opium: for in those grey eyes of the cleric was hinted anon the baleful glint of the cobra's. ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... the devilish Weyler sailed away from the beautiful "Queen of the Antilles," and wondered that the cruel, infernal, tyrannical wretch was not ignominiously slaughtered by some of the victims of his starvation reign. A rattlesnake-cobra-tarantula human deformity! ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... his sister very closely, saw that she started at the sight of the wretch, and seemed immediately to shrink still further within herself, whilst her eyes, suddenly luminous and dilated, rested on him like those of a captive bird upon an approaching cobra. ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... might make their peace with the Admiralty Courts at home. So one night Captain Brand and Captain Malyoe, with two others of the pirates, went ashore with two great chests of treasure, which they buried somewhere on the banks of the Cobra River near the place where the old Spanish ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... pulled on in perfect silence for the best part of an hour, the leader of the expedition directing the course of the boat straight across the harbor, as though toward the mouth of the Rio Cobra River. Indeed, this was their destination, as Barnaby could after a while see, by the low point of land with a great long row of coconut palms upon it (the appearance of which he knew very well), which by and by began to loom up out of the milky dimness ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... was spent on the water or on the pier. There we used to meet him, and he and Dr. Talmage would exchange reminiscences, serious and ludicrous. One of the Doctor's favourite stories was an account of a terrific fight he saw in India, between a mongoose and a cobra. Mr. Jefferson also had a story, a sort of parody of this, which described a man in delirium tremens watching in imaginary terror a similar fight. Years before this, when the Doctor had delivered his famous sermon in Brooklyn against the stage, Jefferson was among ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... cobra hears the careless foot of man, He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it as he can. But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail. For the female of the species is more deadly ...
— The Years Between • Rudyard Kipling
... teachers, when it's so easy to slide down hill in this part of New York. But here endeth the sermon, for I recognize the amiable Pinkie at that other table, where she is studying your face with the malevolence of a cobra." ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... the thick grass at the foot of the bush there came a low hiss—a horrid cold sound that made Rikki-tikki jump back two clear feet. Then inch by inch out of the grass rose up the head and spread hood of Nag, the big black cobra, and he was five feet long from tongue to tail. When he had lifted one-third of himself clear of the ground, he stayed balancing to and fro exactly as a dandelion-tuft balances in the wind, and he looked at Rikki-tikki with the wicked snake's eyes ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... Kim sprang to his side and dragged him back. A yellow-and-brown streak glided from the purple rustling stems to the bank, stretched its neck to the water, drank, and lay still—a big cobra with fixed, ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... all the way? Or, shall we join the company at the half-way stopping place? Well, it's a matter of your eyes, how you use them. If the knife holds your eyes, you'll never get past it. That knife is like the deadly serpent's glittering eye. If the cobra's eye can get your eye, you are held fast in that awful, ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... It is a sluggish reptile, and therefore more dangerous; for, instead of rushing away, like its fellows, at the sound of approaching footsteps, it half raises its head and hisses. Often have I come to a sudden pull-up on foot and on horseback, on hearing their dreaded warning! There is also the cobra-capello, nearly as dangerous, several black snakes, and the boem-slang, or tree-snake, less deadly, one of which I once shot seven feet long. The Cape is also infested by scorpions, whose sting is little ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... the other's expression. There was to be no throwing in of the towel for Joe Mauser. At the first sign of such a move, the other would dart in, cobra-quick, and deal the finishing blow. The death blow. Rakoczi was fully capable of such speed. The man was a ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... coral snake, elaps fulvius, whose victim becomes ravingly insane and invariably dies. That he possessed some uncanny knowledge of the creature must be admitted because of its close relationship to the Cobra-de-Capello, of Asiatic fame, whose poison, we know, flies directly to the nerve centers and almost entirely ignores the tissue. Four days later I had good ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... Perceiving that your Majesty's spirit was completely broken by some distress of mind under which you were labouring, I determined to rouse your energies by moving you to anger. Because To light a flame, we need but stir the embers; The cobra, when incensed, extends his head And springs upon his foe; the bravest men Display their courage ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... and tie up a large bunch with a black string. Put round the neck a cobra-capella, and dress him in the garments by making nine folds round the waist. He stands on a rock eating men's flesh. The persons that were possessed with devils are put ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... in Batavia during a fever, when his ship lost a man every few days, and how they went reeling ashore with the body, and got still more intoxicated by way of precaution against the plague. He would talk of finding a cobra-di-capello, or hooded snake, under his pillow in India, when he slept ashore there. He would talk of sailors being poisoned at Canton with drugged "shampoo," for the sake of their money; and of the Malay ruffians, who stopped ships in the straits of Caspar, and always saved the ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... offers for one of them to seize it by the tail. In this position the muscles become contracted, the animal is unable to eject its fluid, and is quickly despatched." One might just as well talk of caressing a cobra de capello; yet this laughable fiction finds believers all over South and North America. Professor Baird gravely introduces it into his great work on the mammalia. I was once talking about animals in a rancho, ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... said Phil, as he coolly stalked out, and left Acton curled up on his chair, like a cobra balancing ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... into an uneasy sleep as full of bad dreams as a prickly pear is of points, one of which, I recollect, was that I was setting my naked foot upon a cobra which rose upon its tail and hissed my name, 'Macumazahn,' into my ear. Indeed, the cobra hissed with such persistency that at last I ...
— Hunter Quatermain's Story • H. Rider Haggard
... moment he thought that Captain DeCastros was about to strike him again. He did not. Instead he spat at Mr. Wordsley. He had the speed of a cobra. There was not time to get out of the way. Mr. Wordsley employed a handkerchief on ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... plain, marked every few yards by the bleached bones of camels fallen by the way; the only living thing met with for two days being a snake of the cobra type trailing across our path. The evening of the second day we camped in a long wadi, or shallow valley, full of mimosa trees, where our camels were hobbled and allowed to graze. They delighted in nibbling the young branches of these prickly acacias, which carry ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... gently that I do not feel the scratch, he has achieved a painless vivisection; but if I presently die in torment I am not likely to consider that his humility is amply vindicated by his gentleness. A cobra's bite hurts so little that the creature is almost, legally speaking, a vivisector who inflicts no pain. By giving his victims chloroform before biting them he could comply with the ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... secret, grasping and malicious, may wreak at any hour disasters on the unwary. "Points" are given by one operator to another with the same mendacious glibness as of yore. The market is now dull with the torpor of a sleeping cobra, now aflame, like that reptile, with treacherous and poisonous life. In its repose as in its excitement our novice begins to know it, fear it, and heartily love it besides. The chances are nine out of ten that he loves it too much ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... a creep is staring down at me. He looks part human and part beetle and has a face the color of the meat of an avocado. His head is shaped like a pear standing on its stem and has two eyes spaced about six inches apart and they are as friendly as those of a spitting cobra irked by hives. He is about four feet tall and has two pairs of arms. I guess I am still a little delirious or I would not have told the thing he would make a ...
— Operation Earthworm • Joe Archibald
... section names are very mixed, some being those of eponymous Brahman gotras, as Sandilya, Kaushik and Bharadwaj; others those of Rajput septs, as Karchhul; while others are the names of animals and plants, as Barah (pig), Baram (the pipal tree), Nag (cobra), Kachhapa (tortoise), and a number of other local terms the meaning of which has been forgotten. Each of these sections, however, uses a different mark for branding cows, which it is the religious duty of an Agharia to rear, and though the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... smells and sounds of the jungle. He told of the time when a soldier could get "jungling leave"; when he could go off with a Winchester and a pal and a native guide for two or three months; when the Government paid so many rupees for a tiger skin, so many for a cobra—a scale of rewards for bringing back the trophies of the ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... come laden with miasma-bearing fevers and agues on their wings; while it a fellow has to live on shore he gets roasted by day, with a good chance of a sunstroke, and he is stewed at night, and bitten by mosquitoes and other winged and crawling things, and wakes to find a cobra de capella or green snake gliding over ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... has been bitten by a cobra, or a rattlesnake, or a puff-adder, there are many remedies, but few people who can recommend them from personal experience. It is to be feared that most of them unfortunately die before writing their testimonials. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... quietly, brooding, his elbows upon the table, his inscrutable face propped in the crotch of his hand. A ruby, set quaintly in a cobra's head, gleamed from a ring upon his little finger. Presently ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... made out, moving against the woman's spangled dress. The basket lid was resting on their heads, and as the music and the chanting rose to a wild weird shriek the lid rose too, until suddenly the woman snatched the lid away and the snakes were revealed, with hoods raised, hissing the cobra's hate-song that is prelude to ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... felt the sharp prick on my ankle and looking down saw the snake glide into the undergrowth I believed it was all up with me. I had seen two or three natives who came up to the house for treatment die before my eyes. A saice bitten in the stables by a cobra died in twenty minutes. A mali cutting grass was struck on the hand and died in three quarters of an hour. A punkha coolie on the verandah lost his life within an hour after being ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... my hands of it all!" the priest retorted indignantly. "The half for me, or I wash my hands of it and tell Gungadhura that you know the secret! I will trust him to find a way to draw thy cobra from its hole!" ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... piece of rope. In his hands it takes on life, it gains a strange and sinister quality. One instant it lies passive, or slowly whirled in a careless circle—the next its noose darts out like the head of a striking cobra, the coil falls and fastens, and then it draws tighter and tighter, remorselessly as a ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... over switchback after switchback, as if the hills chased each other but never succeeded in catching up. Then, when we had grown used to such an outlook, the road would twist so suddenly that it seemed to spring up in our faces. It would turn upon itself and writhe like a wounded cobra, before it was ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... thing up on their radar screens, going straight up at high acceleration. They bracketed it with Cobra pursuit rockets and blew it out of the sky when it didn't respond to identification signals. They could trace the thing back to its launching pad, of course, and they nabbed ...
— By Proxy • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Baroda in Guzerat I took lessons in snake-catching, but found the sport too dangerous; when the animal flees, the tail is caught by the left hand and the right is slipped up to the neck, a delicate process, as a few inches too far or not far enough would be followed by certain death in catching a Cobra. At last certain of my messmates killed one of the captives and the snake-charmer would have no more ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... Skin, tough [U.S.]; Mohawk, Mo-hock, Mo-hawk; bludgeon man, bully, rough, hooligan, larrikin^, dangerous classes, ugly customer; thief &c 792. cockatrice, scorpion, hornet. snake, viper, adder, snake in the grass; serpent, cobra, asp, rattlesnake, anaconda^. canker-worm, wire-worm; locust, Colorado beetle; alacran^, alligator, caymon^, crocodile, mosquito, mugger, octopus; torpedo; bane &c 663. cutthroat &c (killer) 461. cannibal; anthropophagus^, anthropophagist^; bloodsucker, vampire, ogre, ghoul, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Katibas Iban, tells us that he has been helped by a python ever since he was a youth, when a man came to him in a dream and said, "Sometimes I become a python and sometimes a cobra, and I will always help you." It has certainly helped him very much, but he does not know whether it has helped his children; nevertheless he has forbidden them to kill it. He does not like to speak of it, but he ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... warm. Tall palm trees grew in long rows on the shore and bore coconuts in their top branches. Men red as copper galloped over the immense green prairies and threw their arrows at the buffaloes, who turned against them with their sharp horns. An enormous cobra which had crept up the stem of a tall palm tree threw itself on to a little llama that was grazing at the foot. Knaps! it was all over ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... but in the Bacteriological Laboratory at Parel in Bombay, which Lt.-Col. Glen Liston controls with so much zeal and resourcefulness, I was shown the process by which the antidotes to snake poisoning are prepared, for dispersion through the country. A cobra or black snake is released from his cage and fixed by the attendant with a stick pressed on his neck a little below the head. The snake is then firmly and safely held just above this point between the finger and thumb, and a tumbler, with a piece of flannel round its edge, is proffered to it to bite. ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... understratum of fear. These excellent creatures, so good, so faithful, so devoted, so loving, may go mad at any moment, and then they become more dangerous than a lance-head snake, an asp, a rattlesnake or a cobra capella. This reacts on my love for dogs. Then dogs strike me as a bit uncanny; they have such a searching, intense glance; they sit down in front of you with so questioning a look that it is fairly embarrassing. Goethe ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... flying to right and left; and the answering volley was far more deadly than the effects of firing up hill. The Indians stood their ground, fitting their arrows with swift dexterity, encouraged by Anastacio, who glided from point to point like a hungry cobra, discharging two arrows to every man's one. His only hope was to keep the Californians at long range until losses compelled the latter to retreat: at close quarters arrows would be no ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... would have been cheer and excitement in this mild activity, after their farm-house weeks; indeed Father suggested, "We ought to stay and see the movies. Look! Royal X. Snivvles in 'The Lure of the Crimson Cobra'—six reels—that sounds snappy." But his exuberance died in a sigh. A block down Harpoon Street they saw a sign, light-encircled, tea-pot shaped, hung out from a great elm. Without explanations they turned ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... two feet in diameter. After a few passes of the hand, the tent was lifted. The seed had already sprouted, and had become a twig with leaves. Covering the plant once more, he called our attention to a cobra-charmer, who played harmlessly with a hooded and venomous snake. At last he threw the tent wholly aside, and there stood a fully developed little mango tree, perhaps two feet high. It seemed impossible that the folds of the tent, which had been shaken ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... now to be done with this? All along the coast there are such notions about its value that to replace it in the tomb would be simple madness.' I made no reply. 'Indeed,' she continued, looking at the amulet as she might have looked at a cobra uprearing its head to spring at her, 'it must really be priceless. And to think that all this was to be buried in the coffin of—! It is your ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... corner of the house, and showed him a little box in which was coiled a tiny snake, like the hair spring of a watch. She passed her hands over it, and it grew in size, till at last it became a huge cobra, with hood erected. The husband, terrified, begged his wife to lay the spirit. She passed her hands down its body, and it gradually ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... the second finger of the left hand was a ring—a shield-shaped bloodstone set in gold, with a monogram that might have been either "B.K." or "B.L." On the third finger of the right hand was a silver ring in the shape of a coiled cobra, much worn and tarnished. Gunga Dass deposited a handful of trifles he had picked out of the burrow at my feet, and, covering the face of the body with my handkerchief, I turned to examine these. I give the full list in the hope that it may lead to the ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... save and to destroy." An enlargement, possibly, of prehistoric man's reminiscence of now extinct monsters, the dragon is, in its artistic development, a mythical embodiment of all the powers of moisture to bless and to harm. We shall see how, when Buddhism entered China, the cobra-de-capello, so often figured in the Buddhistic representations of India, is replaced by ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... as a small round stick. An innocuous snake, the Trovidonotus macrophthalmus, an inhabitant of India, likewise dilates its neck when irritated; and consequently is often mistaken for its compatriot, the deadly Cobra.[23] This resemblance perhaps serves as some ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... snakes in Borneo, but none, with the exception of the cobra, are deadly. Centipedes and scorpions are common, and the Tarantula spider is also occasionally, ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... read, with thrilling nerves, how a huge cobra, reared on his coils, sways his terrible head from side to side before striking. Well, all those black heads before us were swaying in unison, but with a sickening circular movement, which was regularly reversed in direction. Three times by the right and then three times by the left those heads circled, ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... plants (Arisaema) and their relation Sauromatum guttatum of the order Araceae are very common in the woods. The striped spathe in some species of Arisaema bears a curious resemblance to the head of a cobra uplifted to strike. Orchids decrease as one proceeds westwards, but irises are much more common in Kashmir than in the Simla hills. The Kashmir fritillaries include ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... happened?" I cried, rushing forward to seize her in my arms. She raised her right hand above her head and, as I had almost reached her, threw something full in my face! Instinctively I struck at it with my walking-stick, and it fell in the grass at my feet,—it was a young Indian cobra—Naja tripudians—a serpent of the deadliest sort. I did not pause to reason how this sweet angel had been so quickly changed into a venomous fiend, although the thought that somehow she had been led to think me false to her, and ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... credit of domesticating the formerly ferocious Belgian hare, and the East Indian fakir makes a friend and companion of the king cobra; but it remained for those ingenious people, the Parisians, to tame the mole, which other races have always regarded as unbeautiful and unornamental, and make a cunning little companion of it and spend hours stroking its fleece. This particular mole ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... manner. Bees will try to escape and go on buzzing for hours on a window, one half of which has been left open. Even a pike continued during three months to dash and bruise itself against the glass sides of an aquarium, in the vain attempt to seize minnows on the opposite side. {34} A cobra-snake was seen by Mr. Layard {35} to act much more wisely than either the pike or the Sphex; it had swallowed a toad lying within a hole, and could not withdraw its head; the toad was disgorged, and began to crawl away; it was again swallowed ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... it?' we all shouted confusedly, as we rushed up to him and looked round in expectation of encountering a tiger—a cobra—we hardly knew what, but assuredly something terrible, since it had been sufficient to cause such evident emotion in our usually self-contained comrade. But neither tiger nor cobra was visible—nothing but Cameron pointing with ghastly, haggard face and ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... in town," said Colonel Ashley. "I passed his place a while ago. He has a pair of beautiful Benares candlesticks, in the form of hooded cobra snakes, that I want to get. Singa Phut is ...
— The Diamond Cross Mystery - Being a Somewhat Different Detective Story • Chester K. Steele
... for one in that way," broke in Kennedy decisively. "If we are to make any progress in this case, we must look elsewhere than to an autopsy. There is no clue beyond what you have found, if I am right. And I think I am right. It was the venom of the cobra." ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... death with a sudden blow, but harmless and even friendly or beneficent towards those who regarded it with kindly and reverent feelings in place of hatred. It is in part the feeling of the Hindoo with regard to the cobra which inhabits his house and may one day accidently cause his death, but is not to ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... were temporarily frost-bitten, and the watery helpings of fish were eaten in a constrained silence. But with the inevitable roast beef a Scot of unshakeable manner, decorated with a yellow forehead-lock as erect as a striking cobra, turned to follow up what he apparently conceived to be an opportunity ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... land of the elephant and the poisonous cobra, of the tiger and the unsuccessful English missionary, is original and strange. Everything seems unusual, unexpected, and striking, even to one who has travelled in Turkey, Egypt, Damascus, and Palestine. In these tropical regions the conditions of nature are so various that all ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... on sunny days. These snakes I found very interesting, only they got under their blankets and wouldn't come out, and I wasn't allowed to poke them; so I missed seeing several of the most curious. An ugly cobra laid and blinked at me through the glass, looking quite as dangerous as he was. There were big and little snakes,—black, brown, and speckled, lively and lazy, pretty and plain ones,—but I ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... Bedouins almost as meritorious as to slay an Infidel. The Somal have many names for the reptile tribe. The Subhanyo, a kind of whipsnake, and a large yellow rock snake called Got, are little feared. The Abesi (in Arabic el Hayyeh,—the Cobra) is so venomous that it kills the camel; the Mas or Hanash, and a long black snake called Jilbis, are considered equally dangerous. Serpents are in Somali-land the subject of many superstitions. One horn of the Cerastes, for instance, contains a deadly poison: the other, pounded ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... charmer, garuda, hawadiga[3], or whatever else they call him, is as a rule but a poor impostor. He goes about with one fangless cobra, one rock snake, and one miserable mongoose, strangling at the end of a string. My dweller in tombs was richer than all his tribe in his snakes, and in his eyes. I have never seen anybody else with real cat's eyes: eyes with exactly that greenish yellow luminous glare which you see when ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... beasts must live, do they not support us? But 'Everything in its place' is my own motto; the motto of my wife—'All over the place.' Her serpents have shortened my life, word of honour!— they wander where they will. I never lay my head beside those curl rags of hers without anticipating a cobra-decapello under the bolster. It is not everybody's money. Lucrece has no objection to them; well, it is very courageous—very fortunate, since snakes are her profession—but I, I was not brought up to snakes; I am not at my ease in ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... genius that I fancy most have erectile heads like the cobra-di-capello. You remember what they tell of William Pinkney, the great pleader; how in his eloquent paroxysms the veins of his neck would swell and his face flush and his eyes glitter, until he seemed on the verge ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Warrenne saw the twitching body of a large cobra with its head severed close to its neck. Its head had just protruded from under her foot and she had saved the unborn life for which she had fought so bravely by just keeping still.... She had won her brief decoration with the Cross by—keeping still. (Her ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... Belknap's courteous greeting he gave little heed, but like a charmed canary before a cobra his look rested on the second man of the pair. This was a young man with level, gray eyes, who nodded slightly and ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... is a snake, and which has such a deadly poison that it could kill almost all other animals in the jungle by just biting them. So, to save the other animals from being killed by the cobra, God made the mongoose. He is a plucky little creature, about the size of a cat. And he will fight and kill every cobra he sees! But really he is such a wonderful animal that I must keep him for another book, when you are ...
— The Wonders of the Jungle - Book One • Prince Sarath Ghosh
... with a broad black band on each side of the hinder half of the body and tail, the green scales being margined with black. Another snake of the same length is a handsome green whip-snake, graceful in its movements, but ferocious and aggressive in its habits, although quite harmless. The ordinary cobra is not uncommon. The giant cobra is also found in the lower valleys, and grows to a length of 12 or 13 feet. Four species of pit vipers are found. The krait occurs, but is not common. Altogether there are nine species ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... catch its deepest shades, Found sorrow, pain and want, disease and death, Were woven in its very warp and woof. A tiger, springing from a sheltering bush, Had snatched a merchant's comrade from his side; A deadly cobra, hidden by the path, Had stung to death a widow's only son; A breath of jungle-wind a youth's blood chilled, Or filled a strong man's bones with piercing pain; A household widowed by a careless step; The quick cross-lightning from an ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... on the exact knowledge to hand, would have hesitated in rejecting the story as, at least, improbable. Yet it is clear that the stories of the New World may have had an actual basis of fact; for the Heloderma horridum has been, beyond doubt, proved to be poisonous in as high a degree as a cobra or a rattlesnake. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... Bring the whole College of Surgeons. They can watch me die, and tell you learnedly why the blood curdles and the heart refuses to act, but not all their science can beat the venom of the little karait. It is an Indian snake, more deadly than the cobra, with mightier tooth than the tiger. I meant to use that syringe on the whole cursed brood of Frazers in this country. No one would have known what happened to them. But look you, Fate is too powerful. The karait stored his poison for ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... eyes that indescribable expression seen in the eyes of a bird placed in a cobra's den—met the Chinaman's gaze. This gaze was no different from that which habitually he directed upon the people of the catacombs. His yellow face was set in the same mirthless smile, and his eyebrows were raised interrogatively. For the ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... had certainly some most wonderful antidote to the poison of a snake's fangs. In his exhibitions he would allow a cobra to bite a dog or a rabbit, and, in a short time after he had applied his nostrum the animal would thoroughly revive; he advertised his desire to perform upon humanity, but, of course, he could find no one would be fool enough to risk ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... Turning in my seat I saw a man in evening dress who had just entered the room. He was exceedingly dark, almost swarthy, with a thin face, black- bearded to the lips, an abundance of coarse black hair in some disorder, a high nose and eyes that glittered with as soulless an expression as those of a cobra. One of the group rose and introduced him as Dr. Dorrimore, of Calcutta. As each of us was presented in turn he acknowledged the fact with a profound bow in the Oriental manner, but with nothing of Oriental gravity. His smile impressed me as cynical ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... charmer of Madras die two hours after he had been bitten by a cobra,' said Haddo. I had heard many tales of his prowess, and one evening asked a friend to take me to him. He was out when we arrived, but we waited, and presently, accompanied by some friends, he came. We told ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... pulled up his cuff and showed Mr. Gubb his arm. It was beautifully tattooed in red and blue, like the scales of a cobra. ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... squatting in the blazing sun, beg us to give heed to their tricks. They are singularly clever, these Indian mountebanks, especially in sleight of hand tricks. The serpents which they handle with such freedom are of the deadly cobra species, fatally poisonous when their fangs penetrate the flesh, though doubtless when exhibited in this manner they have been deprived of their natural means of defense. True to their native instinct, however, these cobras were more ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... village club, and the head-man and the watchman and the barber, who knew all the gossip of the village, and old Buldeo, the village hunter, who had a Tower musket, met and smoked. The monkeys sat and talked in the upper branches, and there was a hole under the platform where a cobra lived, and he had his little platter of milk every night because he was sacred; and the old men sat around the tree and talked, and pulled at the big huqas (the water-pipes) till far into the night. They told wonderful tales of gods and men and ghosts; ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... not to betray my illusions with this lingering sanity. When I am with her I conceive her a phantom—a something which has stepped out of my madness to divert it. Her body becomes like one of the dreams in my brain. Her little hands reach like cobra heads among my intimacies. She is very beautiful that way. In my mind I caress her as a part of myself. I speak to her and it seems as if my words are talking to each other. Yet her eyes ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... I am stung by a cobra! Holy Virgin! my new cassock ruined too! Ave Maria! light me out of this ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... one of my grooms, a robust woman, and the mother of a large family, all living within my grounds, was bitten by a poisonous serpent, most probably a cobra, or coluber maja, and quickly felt the deadly effects of its venom. When the woman's powers were rapidly sinking, the servants came to my wife, to request that the civil surgeon of the station might be called in to save her life. He immediately attended, and exerted his ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... an enormous cobra, and, under the circumstances, very frightful to see. The Cardysville express agent made a headlong bolt for the door. He slid clear outside across the platform, and landed in the ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... scorn which impressed Harry, but which he did not wholly admire. Travers seemed to him to have the quiet deadliness of the cobra. There was something about him that repelled. The men released him. He straightened his long black coat, smoothed the full ruffles of his shirt and walked away, as if nothing ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and heaven; strange tribes of the middle spaces whose destinies were fixed and complete as our own, but between whose lives and ours were fixed barriers not to be crossed? Had I met one of these beings, inimical to man as a cobra, intelligent as man, hunting Its victim by ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... distrustful inscrutability. The hand which took my letter was very large, very white, and looked as if it would feel horribly flabby. With the other he put on his nose a pair of enormous mother-of-pearl-framed spectacles—things exactly like those of a cobra's—and began to read. He had said precisely nothing at all. It was for him and what he represented that I had thrown over Carlos and what he represented. I felt that I deserved to be received with acclamation. I was not. He read the letter very deliberately, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer |
