"Cobra" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in cases where the experiments are very cruel. If a person scratches me with a poisoned dagger so 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
... monotonous assertion of his own goodness and his own injuries. No sermon could teach more than that hateful book; if it is read aright, it will supply men or women with an armoury of warnings, and enable them to start away from the semblance of self-deception as they would from a rearing cobra when the hood is up, and the murderous head flattened ready to strike. Thackeray worked on the same theme in his story of little Stubbs. Lyndon is the Lucifer of rascals; Stubbs—well, Stubbs beggars the English vocabulary; he is too low, ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... veritable fairyland. On the top of one of those ponderous laminations tilted edgewise is the king of the gnomes of the new glen. We call him Pharaoh. How archly he looks out over his wide domain! His kingly cap is adorned with a cobra ready to strike, yet out on his ample breast floats a most royal but un-Pharonic beard. This is one of the ways the quondam haughty hills have of providing entertainment for the bold ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... with the figure of a serpent. But he declares that he has devised a plan to set them free. He bids the king wait upon Queen Dharini, and presently rushes into their presence, showing his thumb marked with two scratches, and declaring that he has been bitten by a cobra. Imploring the king to care for his childless mother, he awakens genuine sympathy in the queen, who readily parts with her serpent-ring, supposed to be efficacious in charming away the effects of snake-poison. ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... listened 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. ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... tentacle flung out like a striking cobra, its forked tip flaming blue and green fire as it focussed upon the open door. But Leah was already gone. Gordon heard her flying footsteps as she raced down the hall. Arlok promptly sped after her ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... overhears two owls talking about 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 ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... which 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 ...
— The Wonders of the Jungle - Book One • Prince Sarath Ghosh
... were scarlet with the pomp of poppies, others tinged to the yellow of a Celestial by the feathery mustard; and still others blue as a sapphire's heart from the dye of millions of bluets. A dozen small rivers—or perhaps it was only one—coiled and twisted like a cobra in sinuous action, in and out among the pasture ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... 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 for compression. It is admirably told. It leads up to a situation as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... the 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 of ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... 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 and a trifle contemptuous. ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... happening, but all at once he gave a tremendous leap into the air, lifted his trunk, trumpeted like an Army bugle, and then set off at full speed through the tangled jungle. He had stupidly stepped upon a cobra! And the cobra, before it was squashed to pulp, had stung him between ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... haje) is a species of cobra. It is a large snake, varying from three to six feet in length, and is extremely venomous. It haunts gardens, where it is of great use, feeding on mice, frogs, and various small reptiles. It has the power of greatly ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... times to avoid a noose, with which they were at first easily caught. An excellent observer in Ceylon, Mr. E. Layard, saw (60. 'Rambles in Ceylon,' in 'Annals and Magazine of Natural History,' 2nd series, vol. ix. 1852, p. 333.) a cobra thrust its head through a narrow hole and swallow a toad. "With this encumbrance he could not withdraw himself; finding this, he reluctantly disgorged the precious morsel, which began to move off; this was too much for snake ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... Italians I unhesitatingly lay at the door of the Church;—she is the nation's destroyer. When I first saw the Laocoon in the Vatican, I felt that I saw the symbol of the country;—there was Italy writhing in the folds of the great Cobra di Capella, the Papacy. ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... of the natives was by this archer, who deliberately drew an arrow from over his shoulder and fitted it against the string of his bow. The fact that the missile was undoubtedly coated at the end with a virus more deadly than that of the rattlesnake or cobra was enough to render the would-be friend uncomfortable and to ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... Naik, and 6 of Chaudhri. The 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 Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... now the chief complaint, and even the bon ordinaire had lost much of its attraction. A harmless snake was killed and bottled; its silver robe was beautifully banded with a line, pink as the circles of the "cobra coral," which ran along the whole length of the back. It proved to be a new species; and Dr. ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... of Martinique almost uninhabitable; the tic paloonga (Daboii russelli) is the scourge of Cinghalese coffee estates; the giant ehlouhlo of Natal (unclassified) by its presence secures a forbidding waste for miles about; the far famed cobra de capello (Naja tripudians) ravages British India in a death ratio of one-seventh of one per cent. of the dense population, annually, and is the more dangerous in that an assumed sacred character secures it largely from ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... 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
... a poison in the system as asserted, Wallie had a notion that his bite would have been as fatal as a cobra's. ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... obeyed and revealed the tail of a large cobra disappearing among the improprieties. Jim ran to a rude cupboard where pistols and ammunition were kept, and began to load ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... 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
... violet and canary yellow, wandered down to the post-office. To the city-bred Applebys there 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 ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... we use care. I am familiar with the country for miles in every direction. We shall have to travel for the first two or three days through a thick jungle, and it is too dangerous work to undertake in the night-time. This, you know, is the land of the cobra and the tiger, not to mention a few other animals and reptiles equally unpleasant in their nature. Last night," continued the doctor, "I saw a glare in the sky off to the westward on the opposite side of the river in the direction ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... several attempts, was not uttered. For the idea of being bitten, of receiving the two sharp fangs of the monster in my flesh, was so horrible that, cowardly or no, I could not call. I had heard too much of the results of a cobra bite, and the thought of the insidious poison making its way rapidly through the veins, and ending one's life by arresting the pulsations of the heart in a few minutes, or at most hours, was too terrible for ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... 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 ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... including the rattlesnakes and moccasins; all of these have a pit-like depression between the nose and eyes, and hence are called pit-vipers. In the southern portion of our country there are two species of a colubrine genus closely related to the dreaded cobra of the East, one of them being called the coral-snake or harlequin snake, and the other, which occurs in the southwest, is ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... lobe of the right ear was gone. On 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 ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... noise, and the great cobra swayed its inflated neck to and fro as though to some mysterious rhythm, the native with naked hand and arm seeming to ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... 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 of ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... his troopers filed out. Umballa fingered the empty bags, his brow wrinkled. Cut off a cobra's head and it could only wriggle until sunset. Umballa gave the vanishing captain two weeks. Then ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... been pasteboard; and, at the same instant, Tim sprang from the other side of the bed, and fainted in the arms of the men. Hossein threw off the rug, and there, severed in pieces, lay the writhing body of a huge cobra. ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... the horse, the ox, the stag, the sheep, the hog, the dog, the cat, the rat, the peacock, the eagle, the cock, the hawk, the serpent, the chameleon, the lizard, the tortoise, fishes, and even insects. Of these, some receive much more worship than others, such as the cow, the ox, and the serpent Cobra Capella. I will speak at present only of the worship of ...
— Dr. Scudder's Tales for Little Readers, About the Heathen. • Dr. John Scudder
... 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 ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... says, "some of the company begiu by caressing it, until an opportunity 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 ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... the Egyptian goddess Uto (hierogl. W'zy.t), confused with the name of her city Buto (see BUSIRIS). She was a cobra-goddess of the marshes, worshipped especially in the city of Buto in the north-west of the Delta, and at another Buto (Hdt. ii. 75) in the north-east of the Delta, now Tell Nebesheh. The former city is placed by Petrie at Tell Ferain, a large and important site, but as yet yielding ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... survival would a skunk have without odor; a cobra without venom; a turtle without carapace; or a porcupine shorn of its barbs, in an environment of powerful and hostile carnivora? And yet in such an hostile environment many unprotected animals survive by their muscular power of flight alone. It is evident that the provision for the ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... 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 ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... extracting many promises from him not to tell, she confided to him the secret, and took him to the 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 shrank ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... the snakes of Australia have an unpleasant habit of coming around the houses, and this is particularly the case with the tiger snake, which in this respect seems to possess the same characteristics as his relative the 'cobra,' of India. Our host told us a story which he said he knew to be a true one, the incident having occurred in a family with which he was acquainted. There was an invalid daughter in the family, and ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... country, of which Lobengula (a great and cruel scoundrel) is king, with many regrets we parted from our comfortable wagon. Only twelve oxen remained to us out of the beautiful span of twenty which I had bought at Durban. One we lost from the bite of a cobra, three had perished from "poverty" and the want of water, one strayed, and the other three died from eating the poisonous herb called "tulip." Five more sickened from this cause, but we managed to cure ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... 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, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... pleasure from its gorgeous fragrant flowers and not quarrel with its leafless limbs. When the pipal and the neem glisten with star flowers and sweeten the foetid night-air, it matters nothing to me that the natives believe evil gods home in the branches. I know that even a cobra tries to get out of my way if I'll let him, and I know that the natives have beauty in their natures—one gets to almost love them as children. So, my dear Captain, when you tell me that the Gulab rendered you and me and the British Raj this tremendous ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... 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 ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... to where, beyond the wrecked debris of three cabins, the cruiser's side gaped open to a clear sky and a line of splashing waves. Overhead on deck the twelve-pounders were barking out a series of ear-splitting reports—much as a terrier might yap defiance at a cobra over the ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... 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, ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... 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 and again disgorged; and now the snake had learnt by experience, ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... Incident in the War of Mexican Independence Sketch from Life on the Ocean Escape from Shipwreck The Hunter's Wife Deaf Smith, the Texan Spy Escape from a Shark Adventure with Pirates A Sea-Fowling Adventure Adventure with a Cobra di Capello Combat of Wild Animals Perilous Incident on a Canadian River Leopard Hunting Hunting the White Rhinoceros A Leopard Hunt Life in California A Storm among the Icebergs Fall of the Rossberg The Rifleman of Chippewa Shipwreck of the Blendenhall Adventures ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... away from our eyes. He covered the jar with a little tent not 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 out at the beginning, could ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... will be the universal language.' But far the most important 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 ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... 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
... as he sat beside me at the midday halt. "I tried to show him how he could get a good snapshot, and now he's as poisonous as a red-necked cobra just because he was silly ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... are 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 ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... say, 'No one shall play here but with mine'—aqui no se juega sino con mis barajas. If the gamblers are cowed, they give him dos cuartos, a halfpenny each. If, however, one of the challenged be a spirited fellow, he defies him. Aqui no se cobra el barato sino con un punal de Albacete—'You get no change here except out of an Albacete knife.' If the defiance be accepted, vamos alla is the answer—'Let's go to it.' There's an end then of the cards, all flock to the more interesting ecarte; ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... In the pools, too, was a species of small alligator or enormous iguana, I do not know which, that fed, Billali told me, upon the waterfowl, also large quantities of a hideous black water-snake, of which the bite is very dangerous, though not, I gathered, so deadly as a cobra's or a puff adder's. The bull-frogs were also very large, and with voices proportionate to their size; and as for the mosquitoes—the "musqueteers," as Job called them—they were, if possible, even worse than they had been on the river, and tormented ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... and 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 and fears it too little. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... 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
... The cobra, since defiled. He watched, when the beasts had gone Our kissing and singing wild. Beautiful friend he was, Sage, not a tempter grim. Many a year should pass Ere Satan ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... scream, and snatched her arm out of the hole. To it, or rather to her hand, was hanging a great hooded snake of the cobra variety such as the Boers call ringhals. She shook it off, and the reptile, after sitting up, spitting, hissing and expanding its hood, glided back into the wall. Tabitha sat still, staring at her lacerated finger, which Ivana seized ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... their mouths with water after taking food. The betel-leaf is considered sacred; a silver ornament is made in its shape and it is often invoked in spells and magic. The original vine is held to have grown from a finger-joint of Basuki, the Queen of the Serpents, and the cobra is worshipped as the tutelary deity of the pan-garden, which this snake is accustomed to frequent, attracted by the moist coolness and darkness. The position of the Barai is the same as that of the Mali; his is really a low caste, sometimes coupled ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... 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 able to ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... 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 ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... glass dome formed its roof, and there was no window besides. The lights were cunningly concealed behind a weirdly coloured fresco of Oriental figures. But one lamp alone on a small table burned with a still red glow. This lamp was supported on the stuffed skin of a hooded cobra. ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... 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 ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... so quickly 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... 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
... The Mountain that shed the brownest horror on its woods was the existence of the terrible region known as Rattlesnake Ledge, and still tenanted by those damnable reptiles, which distil a fiercer venom under our cold northern sky than the cobra himself in the land of tropical ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... whirling with astonishing rapidity in a kind of frenzied dance around the wicker basket that contained the serpents, which were covered by a goatskin. Suddenly he stopped, plunged his naked arm into the basket, and drew out a cobra de capello, or else a haje, a fearful reptile which is able to swell its head by spreading out the scales which cover it, and which is thought to be Cleopatra's asp, the serpent of Egypt. In Morocco it is known as the buska. The charmer folded and unfolded the greenish-black ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... 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
... 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
... 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 Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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
... who 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. Perhaps they were too long ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... his loins was a short kilt of the same material; and round his forehead, arms and knees were fillets of snakeskin. At his side hung his pouch of medicines, and in his hand he held no spear, but a wand of ivory, whereof the top was roughly carved so as to resemble the head of a cobra reared ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... world-wise, 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
... 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 ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... he brought in a king cobra (naia bungarus) which he had shot, and as life was not yet extinct I got a good photograph of it. This serpent was about three metres long, but these very poisonous snakes, called ular tadong by the Malays, attain a length of seven metres. They are beautifully formed ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... cobra he takes out; you know it by its large, flat head. It seems sleepy and stupid, but its bite is deadly. It is possible, of course, that he has abstracted the poison-fangs which make its bite fatal, but even without them I shouldn't care to ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... 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 charge, however, and ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... de menos Cantidad, tiene El alcalde mayor de salario trecientos pesos librados en las penas de camara y si no alcancare en la Real caxa cobra por comission del goueror y de los oficiales Reales los tributos qe pertenecen a su magd en aquella ysla. qe seran poco mas de dos mil hombres, en el Rio de haraut y Rio de ajuy y Rio de panay y los quintos del oro que se labra ques casi nada esta esta uilla, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various
... medical examination proved that the fellow had been killed by snake poison—cobra, to be exact, which is found principally ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... correct, Caley might have told him. Was she already false? She pondered within herself, and cast no look upon her maid until she had concluded how best to carry herself towards the earl. Then glancing at the hooded cobra beside her—"What an awkward thing that Lord Liftore, of all moments, should appear just then!" she said. ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... blow, I suppose," said the white-faced Jack, who had good reason to be terrified over the occurrence, for the rattlesnake, although ranking below the cobra in the virulence of its venom, is the most deadly serpent in America, and the veteran hunter fears it more than the ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... sticks, and put their rice in the pot to boil. As Ned was stooping to pick up a stick he was startled by a simultaneous cry of "Look out!" from Dick, and a sharp hiss; and looking up, saw, three or four feet ahead of him, a cobra, with its hood inflated, and its head raised in the very act of springing. Just as it was darting itself forward Dick's stick came down with a sharp tap on its head ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... the foulest offal; and was in all things a type and incarnation of that which man ought not to be. Why should not he, so like the worst of men, have some bond or kindred with the evil beings who were not men? Why should not the graceful and deadly cobra, the horrid cerastes, the huge throttling python, and even more, the loathly puff-adder, undistinguishable from the gravel among which he lay coiled, till he leaped furiously and unswerving, as if shot from a bow, upon ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... of course, that this beast of prey devoured the pretty little widow and all her substance with less hesitation or remorse than a cobra might have felt in ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... of Africa, but hitherto I had always put them down as fabulous creatures transformed into and worshipped as local gods. Also this particular specimen was, I presume, of a new variety, since, according to Ragnall, it both struck like the cobra or the adder, and crushed like the boa-constrictor. It is possible, however, that he was mistaken on this point; I do not know, since I had no time, or indeed inclination, to examine its head for the poison fangs, and when next I passed that ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... there are any snakes here," she said carelessly. "There is an old cobra under the dining-room floor, and we often hear her hissing to herself, but she ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... basking 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
... be learned from expensive 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
... tell you. 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
... simpler when we ascend in the scale: we may trace the immanent Deity in all that is good and fair in nature, in all its smiling and beneficent moods—but what of nature's uglinesses and cruelties? Is God expressing Himself in the ferocity of the tiger, the poisonous malice of the cobra, the greed of every unclean carrion-bird? If He is such as religion represents Him, how can He be present in these? We may quote with rapture the familiar lines in ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... fallen from favour, and was living with her only son on the seashore. The Prince passed his childhood alone and forlorn, sitting by his forlorn mother, weaving the net of his big desires. He longed to go in search of the Flying Horse, the Jewel in the Cobra's hood, the Rose of Heaven, the Magic Roads, or to find where the Princess Beauty was sleeping in the Ogre's castle over the thirteen rivers ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... character of that reptile, she would have trembled all the more. She saw before her one of the most venomous of serpents, the black naja, or "spitting-snake"—the cobra of Africa—far more dangerous than its congener the cobra de capello of India, because far more active in its movements, and equally fatal in ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... at Bholat will learn of the massacre, and will learn too, that not quite all were killed. He will come hotfoot to find the four we could not find. For these British are as cobras; slay the he cobra and the she one comes to seek revenge. Slay the she one and beware! Her husband will track thee down, and strike thee. They are ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... most gorgeous appearance. My Ghorka guide could give me no information as to what particular divinity this figure was intended to represent. The other pillar was crowned by the figure of a Newar monarch with an unpronounceable name, who was watched over by a cobra, standing upon its tail, and looking over his head with ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... they lack both the fairy elegance of Netley Abbey, and the massive grandeur of a Pevensey Castle. The men who accompanied me advanced very cautiously through the thick underwood, beating with their sticks in order to drive away the Iguana Lizards, which they call the "bis cobra" and hold in deadly fear, believing its bite to be most surely fatal. This belief is universal among the natives of India, but there is no proof of its truth, and I need hardly say that the dental arrangement of Bactrachian reptiles is incompatible with the possession of poisonous qualities. ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... marked serpent. Its colors are scarlet, black and yellow. This snake is found in the southeastern and central United States. It is a near relative to the deadly Cobra-de-Capello and is itself poisonous. ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... 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
... the 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, ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... small stream of water, and bites the unfortunate people who are in the habit of going there to drink. The brute creation it never molests. They avoid it with the same instinct that teaches the animals of India to shun the deadly cobra. ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... accident, and for one written there are a thousand, infinitely more powerful, spoken. They are deeds: the man who brings word of a lost battle can work no comparable effect with the muscles of his arm; Iago's breath is as truly laden with poison and murder as the fangs of the cobra and the drugs of the assassin. Hence the sternest education in the use of words is least of all to be gained in the schools, which cultivate verbiage in a highly artificial state of seclusion. A soldier cares little for poetry, because it is the exercise ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... he said, "I'm rather glad you're not a common thief. You've lots of pluck—plenty. You're as clever as a cobra. It isn't every poisonous snake that is ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... is Monsieur Mueller who has done me this service," he said coldly; but with a flash in his eye like the sudden glint in the eye of a cobra di capello. "I will take care not to ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... which he was Administrador was in the Province of Camagey, at Cobra; an overnight trip from Havana, Lee had learned. It was Sunday evening now, and they would have to give up their room at the Inglaterra Tuesday. Obviously there wasn't time to write Daniel and have a reply by then. The other desirable hotels were as full as the ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 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 ...
— Day of the Moron • Henry Beam Piper
... Those cobra species are man-haters. They love to attack and do damage. They go out of their way to bite people. They crawl into huts and bungalows, especially during the monsoon rains, and they infest thatch roofs. But are ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... watch," he whispered, with a swift movement of the arm, most suggestive of a cobra uncoiling itself with intent to strike, as Leonie turned away from the doorway with ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... was very 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 with ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... to the heart gives out his loudest roar, When smitten on the head the cobra lifts its hood And the majesty of the Soul comes out only when a man ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... a virus to his brain about as quickly as it would have carried a cobra's venom. They probably could have made such protein-poisons, too; but they had never used them against men, no doubt because something that could spread ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... Aranuka, and Kuria, well-planted islands. The taro goes to the chiefs, who divide as they please among their immediate adherents; but certain fish, turtles—which abound in Kuria,—and the whole produce of the coco-palm, belong exclusively to Tembinok'. 'A' cobra berong me,' observed his majesty with a wave of his hand; and he counts and sells it by the houseful. 'You got copra, king?' I have heard a trader ask. 'I got two, three outches,' his majesty replied: 'I think three.' Hence the commercial importance of Apemama, ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... 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
... no path—at least to be trodden by human foot. Birds flew around, scared in their solitary haunts. The armadilla and the wolf stood at a distance with glaring eyes. The fearful-looking guana scampered off upon the decaying limbs of the live-oak, or the still more fearful cobra di capella glided almost noiselessly over the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... we met a Rifaee darweesh with his basket of tame snakes. After a little talk he proposed to initiate me, and so we sat down and held hands like people marrying. Omar sat behind me and repeated the words as my 'Wakeel,' then the Rifaee twisted a cobra round our joined hands and requested me to spit on it, he did the same and I was pronounced safe and enveloped in snakes. My sailors groaned and Omar shuddered as the snakes put out their tongues—the darweesh and I smiled at each other like Roman augurs. ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... suppose I am as much afraid of a rattlesnake as the poor wretches who are accustomed to see one swinging by his tail from the branch of a tree any day in the course of their travels. I have only a vague idea that a cobra de capello is an unpleasant customer; but depend upon it, those foreign fellows feel their blood stagnate and turn to ice at sight of the cold slimy-looking monster. Poverty and I travelled the same road once, and I know what the gentleman is. I don't want to ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... colonel. "I expected to see a great man, but at the first glance I saw that I was in the presence of a master. The Thug was tall, active, and slenderly formed; his head was nearly oval; his eye most strongly resembled that of a cobra di capello; its dart was perfectly wild and maniacal, restless, brilliant, metallic, and concentrated." The colonel had a narrow escape from irretrievably affronting this eminent professor of murder, by unguardedly enquiring whether ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... 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
... gossip is the blackest of them all. The blackest of all the black horde, the very worst of the whole evil troop; insinuating, sly and crafty, it creeps around with a serpent's stealth, and carries beneath its tongue the deadly poison of ten thousand adders. The venom can be extracted from the cobra's fangs, but no power on earth can tame the tongue of an unprincipled gossip. Some lies you can kill, but the lie of gossip is imperishable. You may clip its wings, but its flight is unhindered; you may cut off its head, but two will grow out in its place; you may ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... affection for dogs has an 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 disliked that glance of theirs that seems to attempt to incorporate ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... a deep, hissing breath, and when he spoke his voice was as calm and quiet as a coiled cobra. "The both of you come up with the goddamnedest answers to things. Things I never knew about or even cared about before. Things I wish I'd never heard of. Things that don't have any explanation. And—" He stopped, his face ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... drew forth—no! not a razor-edged knife, with which to slash the region of the punctures, but a box of matches, so that the scene might temporarily be surveyed. He saw, not the expected death adder, not a deadly copper head, not the venomous black which flattens and distends the neck like a cobra when its passions are roused, not the great red pugnacious beast which has been known to kill off-hand a big horse, but a shame-faced carpet snake, which, though innocent and inoffensive, will, like the worm, turn if rudely trodden on. The snake was ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... and a little, low, plaintive whistle, is the only reply, but they speak in thunder of boa-constrictors, anacondas, and cobra ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... the height even of five or six feet, and affecting a sandy soil; the natives consider it as an antidote to poisons in general, and regard the bruised root as peculiarly efficacious in curing the bite of the serpent, called Cobra de Copella. ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. V - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... 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 ...
— By Proxy • Gordon Randall Garrett
... 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 less virulent than a snake-bite; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... his torpor, and he staggered to his feet. Meanwhile the ostrich and the young lady had come to the ground, and were rolling about together in a confused heap, over which the elegant neck and open hissing mouth wavered to and fro like a cobra about to strike. With a rush John seized the neck in both his hands, and, putting out all his strength (for he was a strong man), he twisted it till it broke with a snap, and after a few wild and convulsive bounds and struggles ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... rare Tic polonga and carawala Cobra de capello Tame snakes (note) Anecdotes of the cobra de capello Legends concerning it Instance of land snakes found at sea Singular tradition regarding the robra de capello Uropeltidae.—New species discovered in Ceylon Buddhist ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... Arjuna, who proceeded to that forest and gratified Agni, vanquishing on a single car and slaying huge Nagas and Rakshasas, and who married the sister of Vasuki himself, the king of the Nagas? Even as the sun is the foremost of all heat-giving bodies, as the Brahmana is the best of all bipeds, as the cobra is the foremost of all serpents, as Fire is the first of all things possessed of energy, as the thunderbolt is the foremost of all weapons, as the humped bull is the foremost of all animals of the bovine ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... who is able both to 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, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... 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 ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... supercilious 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
... timber,—for teak is one of the products of the forests,—and also for travel and as bearers of burdens. Wild elephants are hunted and trapped in Siam; and tigers, bears, deer, monkeys, and wild pigs abound in the jungles. Crocodiles live at the mouths of the rivers; and the cobra, python, and ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... wickedness has met with a terrible retribution; thou art a slave to the lust and fury of a monster more dreadful than the venomous and deadly cobra ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... When Nag, the wayside cobra, hears the careless foot of man, He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can; But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail, For the female of the species is ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... this subject, is told in one of a series of interesting articles in "Household Words," called "Wanderings in India." The author is talking with an old soldier about a cobra-capello, which has been known to the latter ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... 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, one of whose hairs rings if it falls to the ground—see Naake's Slavonic ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— Operation Earthworm • Joe Archibald
... either dismayed or deprecating. Budding conversationalists 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 ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... character as The Destroyer. His face is turned to the east and wears a stern, commanding expression. His head-dress is elaborate and crowned by a tiara beautifully carved. In one hand he holds a citron and in the other the head of a cobra, which is twisted around his arm and is reaching towards his face. His neck is adorned with strings of pearls, from which hangs a pendant in the form of a heart. Another necklace supports a human skull, the peculiar symbol of Siva, with twisted snakes growing from the head ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... mind me!" laughed Nick. "No one knows better than I that she is made to twist all ways. She hates me as a cobra ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... quite a novel charm To see him start in wild alarm And haste to tell the awful crimes Of Horrid Serpents in the Times. It used to be a bitter pang That I was born without a fang, That Nature made me as a toy For any silly idle boy. But now the humble snake may pass For lurking cobra in the grass, While people think that Regent's Park Is Kipling ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... perceived that the snakes are not much interested in cattle; they kill only 3,000 odd per year. The snakes are much more interested in man. India swarms with deadly snakes. At the head of the list is the cobra, the deadliest known to the world, a snake whose bite kills where the rattlesnake's bite ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... close to the cattle-fold, where its remains, like those of a chief, were henceforward kept perfectly undisturbed. The period of penance, as in the case of mourning for the dead, is now happily reduced to a few days." In Madras it is considered a great sin to kill a cobra. When this has happened, the people generally burn the body of the serpent, just as they burn the bodies of human beings. The murderer deems himself polluted for three days. On the second day milk is poured on the remains of the cobra. On the third day the guilty ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the rain-god of the East or the enemy of the rain-god; either the dragon-slayer or the evil dragon who has to be slain. The Indian word Naga, which is applied to the beneficent god or king identified with the cobra, can also mean "elephant," and this double significance probably played a part in the confusion of the ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... moment arrows were 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 ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... the venom fang or the crushing power of snakes, but not to an aversion inspired by its form and movement. It was the Greek symbol of Hippocrates and of healing. There is nothing of the kind in Hebrew literature, where the snake is figured as an attractive tempter. In Hindu fables the cobra is the ingenious and intelligent animal, corresponding to the fox in ours. Serpent worship was very widely spread. I therefore doubt whether the antipathy to the snake is very common among mankind, notwithstanding the instinctive terror that their ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... because of the consensus of opinion that arsenic is deadly. Such would probably be her explanation of the destructive processes which go on in the world without the knowledge of man; fire consumes the forest, the tiger kills the antelope, and the bite of the cobra kills the tiger because the human mind has attributed such tendencies to fire, to the tiger, and ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... very susceptible to the charm of harmonious tonal vibration; witness the performance of the Hindu snake charmer, who, while handling that deadly poisonous creature, the cobra-de-capello, plays continuously on flageolets, fifes, or other musical instruments.[65] I, myself, have often held tree lizards completely entranced until grasped in my hand, by ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... lest Nature bungle, That in certain ways she errs: The cobra in the jungle, The crotalus in the sod, Evil and good are hers;— Murderers and torturers! Ye, too, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... giraffe; as to mimicry; as to the heads of flat-fishes; as to the origin and constancy of the vertebrate, limbs; as to whalebone; as to the young kangaroo; as to sea-urchins; as to certain processes of {viii} metamorphosis; as to the mammary gland; as to certain ape characters; as to the rattlesnake and cobra; as to the process of formation of the eye and ear; as to the fully developed condition of the eye and ear; as to the voice; as to shell-fish; as to orchids; as to ants.—The necessity for the simultaneous modification of many individuals.—Summary ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... of late Indian Buddhism survives among the Jains but there is no proof that the multiplication of temples and images was a feature of this style. But in some points it is clear that the Jains have followed the artistic conventions of the Buddhists. Thus Parsvanatha is sheltered by a cobra's hood, like Gotama, and though the Bo-tree plays no part in the legend of the Tirthankaras, they are represented as sitting under such trees and a living tree is ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... in sandals and her skirt was slit to the knees, so that when she walked one caught a glimpse of other slim serpents painted just above her bare ankles. Wound about her neck was a huge, glittering, cotton-stuffed cobra, and her bracelets were in the form of tiny garter snakes. Altogether a very charming and beautiful costume—one that made the more nervous among the older women shrink away from her when she passed, and the more troublesome ones to make great talk about "shouldn't ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... of Fear— Only lidless eyes are clear. Cobra-poison none may leech, Even so with Cobra-speech. Open talk shall call to thee Strength, whose mate is Courtesy. Send no lunge beyond thy length; Lend no rotten bough thy strength. Gauge thy gape with buck or goat, Lest thine eye should choke thy throat After gorging, ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... broadly and let his guard down to a comfortable lepping level. "I was going to bring that up—the faster it's cleared the better. Belle and I are paired. Some day—unless we kill each other first—we may marry. However, I'm no bargain and she's one-third wildcat, one-third vixen, and one-third cobra. ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... 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 ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... 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. ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... 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 |
