I commenced to photograph the stuff, as Deo Rana stood guard outside. Across the yard, the squatting Indian remained at his post, although he had now tossed away his cigarette stub, and was grinning broadly. I had pressed the button of the picture-taking machine for the third time, when a great clattering came from the direction of the station. Setting down the camera, I ran, with Deo Rana, on to the ‘down’ platform on which we had alighted. The footbridge was shaking violently, and resounding to the clatter of boots. They belonged to some functionary or other of Sheoraphuli station – I only saw the chap fleetingly as he came off the bridge and exited the station on the opposite side. He was the guilty party anyhow, and the long and tedious business of running him to earth would now begin, but that would be for others to do, and they would be armed with my report. I had no intention of chasing the fellow through a foreign town with the temperature at a hundred and five degrees. But Deo Rana, I sensed, was disappointed not to be able to do so.
II
On the afternoon of that Monday, I rode a tonga to the Calcutta Zoological Gardens. I arrived early, with half an hour to kill before my appointment with Professor Hedley Fleming. As in London Zoo, which I had once visited, there were queues at all the entrances, and elephants wandered about with grinning children on them. But whereas in London the elephant drivers wore blue uniforms with brass buttons, the elephant men here – mahuts by name – wore hardly any clothes at all. Also, an electric railway ran through this zoo. It ran too fast, like a toy that was about to break. It emitted a whirring noise that could be heard even when it was out of sight, and made the heat of the afternoon seem hotter.
In the reptile house, there was a different kind of humming – from its own electricity generator. It was a hot, dark blue hall. There were ornamental trees, ornamental ponds, and long benches. Glass panels were set into the walls, and behind these were snakes, if you could spot them, but many of the glass cases presented an apparent puzzle: find the snake. Most seemed asleep, buried under sand or bits of log, but when one of them did move, it was thrilling, on account of the winding and unwinding occurring simultaneously. In their oddness the snakes were on a par with the elephants, but elephants knew they were odd, and so they had a kind of resigned look about them, whereas the snakes had absolutely no expression at all. Like the worst of the villains I had come across, they were in some parallel world. All sorts of people you knew looked like elephants, sheep or monkeys, but a snake . . . You might say a snake looked like a small, bald, bad-tempered man whose face had been made worse by having been in a bad house fire.
Hedley Fleming’s office was attached to the reptile house, and at half past three a scientific-looking Indian in a white coat took me from the office into a dark passage, which was the service corridor for the snake enclosures. This was closed off to the public, and the many black doors set into the right-hand wall were bolted shut. In the gloom ahead of me I could see another man in a white coat. He was closing and bolting one of the doors like a prison warder, but he also had alongside him a trolley of the kind used in hospitals, and I had learnt from the Calcutta Directory that Hedley Fleming had practised as a medical doctor in London before coming out to India. He turned towards me. He had a thin face, curly blond hair, pale blue eyes behind round wire glasses. He looked like the cleverest boy in the form. He shook my hand without really looking at me, Meanwhile the Indian who had introduced us did not depart as I expected, but took hold of the trolley and pushed it along to the next door. The trolley squeaked badly. Upon it was a mix-up of odd-shaped glasses and bottles, some rubber tubing, a pump-like thing, and what I slowly realised was an outsized single white canvas glove – a glove for the hand of a giant: his left hand. Two of the bottles, I saw, had treacly yellow stuff in them. In the semi-darkness, we walked past some metal boxes with holes in them. They’d been put on the left side of the corridor. Thick black cables that were themselves snake-like ran along the floor of the corridor. On the right side, the next doors were coming up, and these were padlocked. The squeaking of the trolley stopped, because the scientific Indian had left off pushing it. He wasn’t overly chatty, this fellow, and nor was his governor. But Professor Hedley Fleming did now turn to me, saying, ‘One more call to make, Captain Stringer, then you will have my full attention.’
He was unshackling one of the two doors we stood alongside – the bigger of the two. As befitted his junior status, the Indian was unshackling the smaller one. The doors did not come right down to the ground, but were more like hatches. Professor Fleming stepped back as he swung open his door, and there was heap of gravel, a grey log and, some three feet beyond that, a pane of glass. I was on the wrong side of that pane of glass. On the right side of it, but still looking horrified, was a small Indian boy, a paying customer of the reptile house. His head just came up to the level of the glass; his mouth opened and closed twice. I could not hear him, but I thought I knew what he had said: ‘Wah-wah!’ Observing that the boy had taken a single pace back – and that with the safety of the glass between him and whatever was in the enclosure – I took two steps back. The Indian had got the smaller trapdoor open, and the professor was putting on the single glove. As he did so, a snake’s head came into view from the right-hand side of the rectangle of light revealed by the open door. The snake’s head was not on the gravel, but about four feet above it, and therefore near the top of the rectangle of light. It was a king, and here was the rope trick all over again.