The Jungle Fugitives: A Tale of Life and Adventure in India<br />Including also Many Stories of Amer by Ellis (ebook reader play store .TXT) 📗
- Author: Ellis
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The minister called for a hand-mirror, and with little trouble threw the bright reflection of the sun into the hole, a little more than a foot deep, fully lighting up the interior.
The cobra was there! It lay motionless in a glistening coil, as if resting from its fruitless pursuit of the frog and brooding over its disappointment. It was an alarming sight, but the good man kept cool, and meant business from the start.
Taking a piece of broken wagon tire, he thrust it slantingly into the hole, to hold the serpent a prisoner, and shoving the muzzle of his revolver forward, he let fly.
Not the slightest motion followed. He had missed. He now gently turned the tire edgewise and fired again. A furious writhing followed, proving that the snake had been hit hard. The tire was instantly turned over flat to prevent its coming out. It struck fiercely at the iron, which in a minute was shifted on its edge again, and the missionary emptied the remaining chambers of his revolver down the hole. Then he turned up the tire once more, and allowed the hideous head to dart forth.
The minister had brought with him a pair of large hedge shears, with which he seized the protruding neck, drew out the snake and gave it a flirt toward the compound. He was so absorbed with his task that he had not noticed the crowd of men, women and children that had gathered to watch the results of his hunt. When they saw a huge cobra flying through the air toward them, there was a scampering and screaming, which might have been less had they known that the grip of the shears had dislocated the serpent's neck.
The good man did not forget that whenever you find one deadly serpent, another is quite certain to be close at hand. He had passed the wagon tire to the teacher, when he began pulling out the wounded cobra, and asked him to insert it again without an instant's delay. This was done, and returning with the hand-glass, the missionary once more conveyed the rays into the underground chamber.
Sure enough a second cobra was there, wriggling and squirming in a way to show that he had received some of the bullets intended for his companion. The revolver was reloaded and a fusillade opened, standing off a few paces, the marksman waited for the head to come forth that he might seize and draw it out as he had done with the other.
The wounded reptile continued its furious squirming and striking, but its head did not appear, until shot after shot had been fired. At last it showed itself, and was immediately gripped with the shears. Dropping the pistol, the missionary employed both hands in the effort, and running backward a few steps, the whole frightful length of the serpent was drawn out upon the ground.
Remembering their former experience, the crowd moved away, but the missionary spared them a second fright.
Both cobras being helpless, an examination was made of them. The second one showed the marks of fourteen pistol balls through his body, any three of which would have proved fatal, but he was still full of fight, and died while trying to strike the persons near him.
The serpents were now stretched out on the veranda and measured one of them five feet eleven inches long, and the other six feet two inches. The last is an extraordinary size, rarely seen even in the favorite haunts of the reptile. An investigation of their home left no doubt that they had been living for months right among the flower pots that were attended to daily, and within six feet of the veranda and twelve feet of the door of the missionary's study.
As for the frog that crawled under the box just in time to save himself, he was well and flourishing at the last accounts.
CYCLONES AND TORNADOES.
Science as yet has not been able to grasp the laws that govern cyclones. They seem to be the result of some intensely electric condition of the elements, which finds an expression in that form. Cyclones, until within a few years, meant those circular tempests encountered in the Pacific and Indian oceans. They are the most destructive of all storms, being far more deadly than monsoons and tornadoes.
All navigators, when caught in a cyclone know how to get out of it. They have only to sail at right angles to the wind, when they will either pass beyond the outer rim of the circular sweep, or reach the center, where the ocean is calm.
The diameters of the ocean cyclones range from fifty to five hundred or a thousand miles. Professor Douglas, of Ann Arbor University, entertains his friends now and then by manufacturing miniature cyclones. He first suspends a large copper plate by silken cords. The plate is heavily charged with electricity, which hangs below in a bag-like mass. He uses arsenious acid gas, which gives the electricity a greenish tint. That mass of electricity becomes a perfect little cyclone. It is funnel-shaped and spins around like a top. When he moves the plate over a table, his cyclone catches up pennies, pens, pith balls and other small articles, and scatters them in every direction.
Cyclones never touch the equator, though the ocean ones are rare outside the torrid one. They are caused by the meeting of contrary currents of winds, and are known under the names of hurricanes, typhoons, whirlwinds or tornadoes. Those terrifying outbursts which now and then cause so much destruction in our own country seem to be the concentration of the prodigious force of an immense ocean cyclone within a small space, which renders them resistless.
A writer in the N. Y. Herald gives some interesting facts regarding these scourges of the air. While the cyclone, as we have shown, may have a diameter of hundreds of miles, the track of a tornado is often limited to a few hundred feet, and rarely has the width of half a mile.
The cyclone carries with it a velocity of as much as 100 to 140 miles an hour. It sends a certain amount of warning ahead of its track, and the acceleration of the wind's speed at any given point, is gradual.
The tornado falls almost without notice, or rather the indications are often so similar to those of an ordinary thunderstorm that only a skilled and careful observer can detect the difference.
The phenomena and effects of cyclones in the West Indies have long been subjects of study and observation. As the center approaches a ship she is assaulted by wind of a terrible force and a sea that is almost indescribable. The water no longer runs in waves of regular onward motion, but leaps up in pyramids and peaks. The wind swirls and strikes until wherever there is a chance for vibration or flutter, even in tightly furled sails, the fabric soon gives way. I once saw a brig go drifting past us in a West Indies cyclone with everything furled and closely lashed with sea gaskets. We were in company nearly at the height of the storm, when the center was only a few miles away. There was a spot in the bunt of
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