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midriff that made him stagger.
     
    Tieg, encouraged by this success, lunged forward. Hal with the lake behind him could go back no farther. He stepped to one side, tripped Tieg with his foot and sent him flying into the lake.
    Tieg disappeared completely. When he came up, dripping and furious, his moustache drooped like a wet dishrag and his formerly erect hair was plastered down on his scalp. The laughter of the men made him more angry.
    ‘I’ll get you for this,’ he raged, and came at his opponent like a runaway locomotive. This time Hal did not dodge. He used a bit of the karate that he had learned in Japan. He stooped under Tieg’s fists, seized his ankles, and sent him soaring through the air to land head down in the python hole in the midst of the flames. Tieg’s wet clothes sent up a column of steam.
    Hal pulled him out of the hole and removed the gun from his holster. Tieg’s adventure in water and fire had taken all the fight out of him.
    ‘Better go and change your clothes,’ Hal said. Tieg got up and stumbled off towards the cabin.

Chapter 7
Another battle lost
    Joro slashed off the head of the dead snake with one stroke of his bush knife.
    ‘We make medicine out of that,’ he said.
    Hal was quite willing to let the men use the dead snake as they pleased. They could grind the skull into a powder and sell the powder to the medicine men.
    The joints of the backbone could be used by village women as a necklace to strengthen the throat - or as a belt to cure stomach-ache. In some African countries a string of python bones was supposed to protect the wearer against snakebite.
    Serpent superstition goes back a long way. Moses set up an image of a Brazen Serpent that was supposed to have healing power. For five centuries it was worshipped as a sort of god. The Greek god of healing, Asklepios, carried a carved serpent wound around a staff. It is still the symbol of the medical profession.
    Even today ‘snake medicine’ is sold in China. It is supposed to be a cure for insanity, convulsions, epilepsy, poor sight, colds, sore throat, malaria, earache, toothache, deafness, arthritis, and rheumatism. In Guatemala hot snake fat is used as a poultice for colds. Snake oil is well known in Puerto Rico.
    Viper flesh was used as a medicine in France until 1884, and before that in London as a cure for the plague.
    Rattlesnake oil was sold in the United States as a remedy for deafness, lumbago, toothache, sore throat, and rheumatism. If you didn’t want to drink it you could just rub it on any ailing part of your body.
    ‘Is that snake dead or not?’ Roger demanded, seeing that the headless body kept on twisting and squirming.
    ‘Not yet,’ Hal said.
    ‘How can it keep on living with its head off?’
    ‘A snake’s brain isn’t just in its head. The rest is all the way down the spine. Keep away from it. If it catches you it can still squeeze the life out of you. Don’t excite it. Keep your voice down.’
    Roger stared at his brother. ‘Are you kidding me? A snake has no ears. Even if it did, it couldn’t hear after its head is gone.’
    ‘A snake,’ Hal said, ‘has ears all over its body.’
    ‘Now you are talking nonsense,’ Roger protested.
    ‘Not complete nonsense,’ Hal smiled. ‘They aren’t ears like ours. They don’t exactly hear sounds. They feel them. Every sound makes vibrations and the snake feels the vibrations. Its nerves are very delicate. It can pick up sound waves that would be too faint or too high-pitched for you to get at all. It can even tell what direction the sound is coming from. Even the light footsteps of a rat would be enough. It can turn and grab that rat without looking for it. The snake’s long body touching the ground all the way from head to tail gives it the ability to detect the slightest vibrations. It’s like a seismograph that is used to record earthquakes. You remember in Japan the newspapers used to say how many earthquakes the seismograph had recorded in a