Blair Collection > Popular tales of the West Highlands > Volume 2

FEARACHUR LEIGH. 369
far from Sparta. At the door were a lot of fellows in shaggy
capotes drinking sour wine and making a row. One of them,
dressed in a kind of sheepskin cloak, with a long crook in his
hand, astonished me by pulling out a serpent a yard long, which
he handled with perfect coolness.
" I rattled down the ladder, to the risk of my neck, and found
that he had a bag full. There might have been half a dozen. I
made him turn them all out, and set the Greeks to catch them
again. My friend ended by producing a number of white powders,
which made the swallower independent of snake bites. 1 bought
a dozen, and proceeded to test them in the candle. They were
vegetable, and I suspect flour."
In Ceylon, according to Sir Emerson Tennent (page 193), it
is the same.
" There is a rare variety (of snakes) which the natives fanci-
fully designate the King of the Cobras. It has the bead and the
anterior half of the body of so light a colour that at a distance it
seems like a silvery white." ..." Eaja or King."
In the same page it appears that the snake charmers use a
certain stone to cure snake bites, and that they also use a certain
root. I do not know the word for snake, but Eaja is not unlike
EiGH, King. Snake charmers are also common in Northern Africa.
The serpent creed then is very widely spread, and the belief
in the Highlands is worth illustration.
Widow Mary Calder (in Sutherland) tells, that " The great
white snake is not uncommon in Sutherland, and has been some-
times, but not often, killed. It never rests by day or by night,
and besides running along the ground, has a revolving motion
peculiar to itself, turning over and over through an ivory ring
which is loose on its body. This is formed from its own slime,
and sometimes slips off, — in which case the snake makes another,
and the finder of the ring is safe against all diseases and enchant-
ments." — Vide adder beads in the Gallovidian Encyclopsedia.
" Another great serpent has been seen by the natives. The
last was nine feet long, and covered with hair ; it had a mane, and
was a bodily manifestation of the evil one."
It was a common belief in the West that " snakes' eggs" were
lucky. I once owned one, but lost it. It was a bead of various
colours, blue and white, apparently of glass, very like those figured
VOL. II. 2 B