Out of his enforced agonies is born “power,” which everyone, of course, can explain, but which no one knows anything about, except that it will bear watching. And when, because of the Pelton Wheels (for whom he is not responsible) Abu Bijl’ develops power to his normal capacity, it is — that it may go further at cheaper rates — damned and devilled up from six thousand volts to eighty-eight thousand by means of “transformers” which are skeletons of Chinese Pagodas with porcelain teetotum tops. These are placed outside the buildings; so, if the overwrought “power” flares up, the scandal is confined between discreet wing-walls of concrete, and the oil which is necessary to the transformation (as corn and wine produce strange results elsewhere) can be run off at once. The whole process is Christianly called “stepping up.”
The rest of Abu Bijl’s tale is as simple as Adam’s own. Having created this power, most of Man’s time and energy are turned to keeping it within bounds. Heaven’s waters from the high hills cannot help making the wheels go round; Abu Bijl’ cannot help making the “power”; and, in that very act, he is forced to develop a conscience. There is a quiet floor in this building where the thunders of the released waters from the wheels are scarcely heard. Here lights change colour; numbers drop as on a hotel-board, but cannot be pushed back again; figures climb to certain heights and there register their ineffaceable maxima; governors report what licence they have given to the governed, and what advantage has been taken of it; and the grosser forms of electric sin clock in silently and go away. All this to the end that no single thing in the whole installation may for one instant presume to break away from the need of the load, the accident or the moment without saying so, and — this is the Hell of it — without waiting for the Superior Mind to put it right! They call that Science! Yet now and again the generous tropical thunderstorm shows what “power production” really means. Even so, men have devised “lightning arrestors,” which, like the transformers, live outside the premises. But I had noticed, on the wall of another building, blue smudges of the same pattern as the lightning once printed on a house of my own. So I hope that Abu Bijl’ is sometimes cheered by the bright faces of companions glancing in.
He was playing with his work while I watched him, and his masters’ telephones told him what more or less power was needed as the trams and trains came on and off in distant cities, and a pen on a drum wrote down what he was giving. In which humble posture I left him, “eyeless at Gaza.” Very soon more brothers will be bolted down alongside him, and more after that if needed; for the Power House has been designed to expand like a patent book-case over the little astonished river.
Sweet Waters
Then we went to look at the waters above the firmament which hung so low overhead. They hauled us up the face of the mountain in a packing-case cable-car beside the pipe-way, and all the vivid landscape, dropping out like the bottom of a box, lay beneath us till we saw right into hot Santos and her tiny ships two thousand feet below. They had had, they told us, some bother with this hillside after deforesting it for the pipes, and were now planting millions of eucalyptus to hold the soil together. But the local ant liked the wood, too, and they thought of gassing him out. They said that when you once began interfering with Nature you had to go on.
Thus our trolley was drawn up into the cloud, and all the known world vanished. We stepped off the cable-way into white nothingness on the edge of a cement road that swung round a corner out of and into space. An unseen motor bellowed beneath us, and tore past — some gentleman of leisure on his way to San Paulo. Our own car followed, and raced us uphill into dense invisibility of thicker cloud. On our right was the shadow of tall forests. On our left ran a sinister white glare that suggested very long drops. The Engineer was a little annoyed at this, because he had wanted us to see his chain of lakes. But how could it be otherwise? The mountain-range stops and milks every cloud from the sea, and draws twelve foot of wet annually. If it didn’t, there would have been no dam; and, so far as we were concerned, there wasn’t — any more than in a working laundry. The Gods were after much finer effects.
The shadow of a thirty-foot cement-mixer — which might have been the brute syenite for a statue of Rameses — hove out of the thickness, and almost at the same instant earth opened in a deep violet red trench which men far down were still deepening. This was a flank of the dam. They were digging back on to firm stuff for a concrete wing of it. We caught the sputter and chuckle of waters falling from a height as though to back the statement. That was the Dam not fifty yards off. When completed, they said, she would stand over a hundred feet high on the face, and would hold back — they gave us the figures in cubic metres or kilometres. The Dam, unmoved by their flatteries, chuckled again, but showed nothing of herself, except one second’s glimpse of leaden waters withdrawn like a skirt whisking round a door.
We tried another angle. Here the world went down like a wall. From the statue of Rameses projected an enormous boom whose block and tackle depended into the abyss and were lost. They served a construction-line below, but how far below we could by no means guess. So there we stood blindfolded. One could hear men and tools at work all round; the very lap of the ripples on stone, but of the Dam which was the heart of all not a hint or a trace came through — just the low laugh of invisible waters escaping into freedom !
Power on the Air
So the engineer was annoyed. But his work till then had been too ridiculously easy. The plateau at the top of the dripping range slopes away from the coast in little crumpled hills, which are not much good as farming land. All he had to do was to plug up the necks of certain valleys with concrete, and wait till the year’s twelve-foot rainfall drowned them at leisure. While thus employed, he came across a river and its system which was following its prehistoric courses southward towards Buenos Aires. Happening to notice that its watershed was nothing to write home about, he dredged it a little and dammed it a little, and coaxed it to turn its unwanted flood-waters (for it was a temperamental stream) into his dams and through his Pelton wheels, at the foot of the range, and so across the flats into Santos — coastward instead of south. I think a tunnel or two was involved; but, at any rate, he has now a system of inland lakes and seas, connected by his sorts of plumbing, and capable of indefinite expansion if he plugs up more valleys. The requirements are always expanding, as San Paulo discovers that she can make more things for herself, or another railway or two goes in for electrification that they may be shut of English coal-strikes; and it is the simplest of jobs to put up extra Abu Bijl’s in the concrete prisons. They say now that they could deliver half a million more horse-power from this place alone; and this is but one of the several places that stand round San Paulo and sell more power to its elbow.
But they forget that, a few years hence, the Mystery that now fights its way up and down wires will be on the air for sea-work and the shipping industry will be represented by experts at switchboards doling out, on directional beams, the Power that various steamer lines have contracted for. Then the storms of the oceans will translate themselves into peaks and valleys on the indicators, as the far-off, wet sea-captains haul in and slack off their supplies just as their winches to-day deal with their mooring-ropes. At that epoch (which will be heralded by the harakiri of the Oil Barons) Brazil, sitting with her back to illimitable electric power, will sell it between twenty-five North and sixty South on both sides of her continent — westerly to the 180th meridian, and easterly to somewhere on the far side of dry Africa.
All of which I explained to the Engineer in words of one syllable. But he, having spent his whole life doing inconceivable things, said I was “visionary,” and went on talking about his paltry half-million supplementary ponies.
IV
A SNAKE FARM
Adam and the Serpent
Visit to a Modern Snake Farm
Visit to the strangest “Farm”
in the World.
introduction
notes on the text
“Poison o
f Asps”
“POISON of asps is under our lips”?
Why do you seek us, then?
Breaking our knotted fellowships
With your noisy-footed men?
Time and time over we let them go;
Hearing and slipping aside;
Until they followed and troubled us — so
We struck back, and they died.
“Poison of asps is under our lips”?
Why do you wrench them apart?
To learn how the venom makes and drips
And works its way to the heart?
It is unjust that when we have done
All that a serpent should,
You gather our poisons, one by one,
And thin them out to your good.
“Poison of asps is under our lips.”
That is your answer? No!
Because we hissed at Adam’s eclipse
Is the reason you hate us so.
“Poison of Asps”
There is, at the far end of one of the never-ending suburbs of San Paulo, a snake-farm where serums are prepared and dispensed against the bites of venomous serpents, which abound in these parts. Like most of the things that matter, it was one man’s notion and work. Unluckily, the man himself was up or down coast at the time of our visit. But we found the “farm” sitting alone amid beautiful grounds in a faultless stretch of drive — a big, white, shuttered remote pile in dead heat among the crashing (colours hit here) green of its cut lawns and the raw bosses and clumps of flowers.
One lawn, enclosed by a low wall, was dotted with two-foot high white domed Kaffir kraals, each pierced by a tiny arch. A moat a couple of feet wide ran between the lawn and the bounding wall which overhung, a trifle, as it rose from the water. Nothing else showed, or moved or sounded, in all that heat and space and colour and overwhelmimg light, till a door in the face of the building opened, and one passed thankfully into cool stillness. A girl in white linen stole down a corridor that gave a glimpse of a hall full of bottles on shelves, and a faint smell of varnish, hard woods and chemicals. Then a block of solid silence, while portraits of eminent men looked down from the pale walls. A far-off echoing step — and a young man came in clad like an umpire, with shortish linen trousers, enticingly low shoes and white socks, and beckoned us to the open, quivering air. His weapon was a stick with a piece of wire bent to right angles at one end of it. He led down to the walled enclosure, entered it across the moat and stood among the tiny kraals as though making up his mind. Had he by chance forgotten his leggings? Not in the least, I was told, but leggings were unnecessary as well as warm. And, talking of leggings, a snake cannot as a rule strike higher than a man’s knee. So, on many farms and factories, leggings are issued to the workmen in the fields. Do they wear them? Not unless they are chased into them. For one thing it is a new notion; and for another it bothers their free legs.
Now a decent, forest-bred snake hates glare as much as an elephant does. Hence the baby kraals, with their small single apertures. The young man felt inside one of these with his stick, and slung out a snake, which he named, balanced on the wire. The body dropped raspingly on the dry crab-grass at the edge of the moat and recovered itself like coiled lighting, its head already set, and in cocked watch upon the man. He half kicked towards it with his shoed foot. It half struck back, showed its death-coloured mouth, and sank back into its coils, cursing a little. Perhaps it knew the routine, or was dizzy with the glare.
The young man passed from kraal to kraal, drawing out, always balanced on the wire, snake after snake, which he named, and pitched beside the first; and as each snake came to rest, its head was watching him as though it had been on that duty since The Expulsion. The recover after the throw-down is quicker than eye can follow, for if a snake be not right side up he is the most helpless of things; but the orientation of the head is quicker than the recover.
Captivity
Then, as the dishevelled and indignant tangle of them grew, one was lifted out of its dark, who dropped from the wire clumsily, almost in a straight line, and lay belly up, drawing painful breath through the length of him; being solely concerned with the business of dying, to which he was left. A little lithe thing, rather like a karait, raced over him into the moat, where it flashed anxiously up and down along the concrete, seeking escape. But the Architect of its Universe had foreseen that there should be no purchase in still water, and it crawled back, over the thoughtfully roughened lip, on the prison side. A companion, making the best of upheaval, floated along the moat effortless in a luxurious knot, but all the while his head was turned towards the man. Some of the others in the heap kept slipping away to the nearest kraal just as worms slip into grass when the bait-can upsets.
There were rattlers among them — big and bad-tempered — who raised their heads and warned. The “rattle” is more like the “sizzle” of dry seeds in a bean, just enough to hint that there is death in the pot; and, curiously, it impresses anyone who has once heard it as much behind secure walls as it does in the open. We had a companion who knew and seemed to love the snakes of his native land. He and the young man talked together about them (most of their names seemed to begin with ja) and to illustrate some point, one flat head was pinned down by the wire stick, caught behind the thin neck, and, with a “scraunch” like shelling prawns, the jaws were forced open to start the fangs. But they carried no venom at the moment, and the thing was thrown into the discard, as though it were a journal that had been read or a politician that had served his turn.
“Yes. All the snakes in this enclosure are venomous — some more than others — but all quite enough. They are collected. They last a year or eighteen months. They are not fed because the hungrier they are the more poisonous they grow.” (This gift also the Serpent bequeathed to the sons of Adam.) “Besides our regular collectors, the farmers send us snakes. For each snake, malignant or harmless, the Institute returns them a dose of serum; and also perforated boxes for sending us more snakes. Of course, the best serum is made from the same breed of snake as bit you. But people are often not accurate when they are bitten, so a ‘general’ serum is sent to the farmers. It cures — it cures surely — but it takes longer and it hurts a little more than the specialized serum. There is no danger in handling snakes if you know how, and if anything happens the injections are just round the corner. Are snakes man-hunters? Only one sort of snake really likes chasing men. The others all want to get away — the harmless snakes first, and, then the poison ones. You see, a poisonous snake is never afraid. He does not hurry. Oh, yes! There is a tale of a snake that is attracted by the smell of wood or tobacco smoke, and will follow it up till it casts itself into the fire. True? Who knows? Snakes are all curious. Would you care to look at our harmless ones? They are put in another place, a little way off.” We moved along the wall of that death-compound, past an enclosure where the grass had not been cut for some time, and half hid the little kraals. Why? “Oh, that is where they breed. We leave them alone.” It must have been imagination, for there was no breath of wind, that made one fancy a tussock of herbage parted and bowed as we looked, but, at any rate, one was glad to think that the A’tosis are left in peace sometimes, and have not to bare their teeth to strangers.
Hunger in the Vines
The harmless snakes lived in an enclosure with a vine-covered pergola, and an evergreen tree in the centre. The stems wove easily back and forth as they crowned the trellis; and in exact and perfect camouflage of curve and colour (when the eye had seized the trick) lay half a dozen or more long thin serpents waiting hopefully for birds that never alighted. The evergreen tree, also, was filled with snakes, said the young man, but the local birds knew too much. These particular snakes came of a breed that always hunted in this fashion. So they climbed hungrily and copied the vines and the mottling and disking of the sunlit leaves, and the shapes of the twigs; and not till we had worked up to the unwinking eyes at the ends could we guess that they were anything else. The short grass beneath the wal
l was full of snakes, at first invisible, and then — till one saw nothing else — two and three overlapping, deep down among the blades. But, nakedly on the top, no more to be concealed than an orange, was a brilliant yellow-red snake with a rat tail, and when she struck at the young man’s foot it was with a curious stiff, weaving, frantic motion like a choking dog. To make more fear, she spread out the ribs behind her neck, and somehow suggested a cobra. “She can bite a little — not much,” said the young man and offered her a fold of linen trouser. She closed and bit, but at once dropped from it dry-mouthed, and hurried away with that stiff, beseeching, uplifted neck as though she were trying to escape from herself, or seeking a deliverer. (And why on earth she should have suggested Lady Macbeth in the sleep-walking scene is another mystery.) Meanwhile, our companion had identified a small graceful little creature as of a kind he had once brought down from the North, and sent in here. “I didn’t know whether she could do anything, but she didn’t all the way from Para to here; so she must have been all right.”) He was fondling her. She made no protest, but twined herself as prettily as Lilith round his arm.
Last of all, was a small boa, who comes of a breed less forsaken than the rest, because boas have a rounded, almost man-jowl and little piggy noses. He was changing his skin — and was therefore half blind, as well as blackish and frayed along his outline. “He can bite, too, if he wants to; but up North where they keep them for pets against the rats, they never bite the people of their own house.” We left him sullen and dazed, waiting for the change which will turn him green, purple, and gold again, and the young man gave our companion the snake that had taken his fancy — in a perforated paper box.
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 743