The snake bite
the government Survey Department as a porter; he knew a
word or two of English, and had a pleasant frank expression
one could trust. All they could do for me would be done,
said diey. They were unmarried, and lived in a small tent
composed of two apartments only, one closed in by the
usual palisade of reeds woven together with wool, the other
open like a verandah where guests could squat for tea.
I had not been sitting very long under the awning when a
gentle old man with a grey beard and nothing on beyond a
very ragged shirt and short black trousers came up and
murmured timidly to the least and most distant members of
the circle that surrounded us, glancing at me with a hopeful
air which one learns to recognize as that of someone who is
asking for medicines. The poorer sort among such petitioners
are apt to be snubbed away before ever they get near enough
to explain their troubles unless one notices them and makes
enquiries.
This man turned out to have a small son of about ten or so,
who had been bitten by a snake two months before. He was a
stranger, belonging to a tribe four miles away, and without
relatives or natural allies among my hosts; and he lived in the
extremity of poverty on the opposite slope of the valley. I
climbed up there with him to a group of tents and found the
sick child on the ground in a noisy circle, bearing up with the
vitality of his age against what would long before have killed
an ordinary European man. The snake bite, they told me,
had been on one finger, as he pushed his hand under a rock.
The poison had spread upwards, and first his hand, and then
his forearm, had dropped off, the latter leaving the bone still
sticking out. The poison had now corrupted his upper arm
to the shoulder, leaving it a swollen mass of raw flesh which
the tribespeople covered with a mess of oak leaves and a
muddy bit of old shirt. The boy's pulse was racing at 120
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