‘Boat is moving, huzoor,’ said Deo Rana, and the snakes were also moving, flowing all about the cabin. I had not yet touched a second snake, but there was a whole uncoiling heap of them by my boot. If I moved my boot an inch, I would touch them. And so I didn’t move my boot. But the snake on the beam was also unwinding, and its head was wavering towards me, and so I needed to move. But because of the boot snakes, I could not move. Deo Rana had picked up a basket lid to protect himself. He was shouting, ‘Huzoor, you have gun! Shoot!’
Shoot what? The snake man’s assistant was no longer with us. I kicked out three times at the boot snakes. That sent some of them away, but others were coming back. Marshalling all my courage, I tried to drag the coiled snake away from its beam, but it tensed and held on, like a disembodied arm flexing its muscles. Its wandering head was looking for me again, and now its mouth was open.
Deo Rana was shouting his latest bit of bad news. ‘Door is closing, huzoor.’
The door was woven bamboo like the rest of the place, but it looked pretty solid, and pressure was evidently being put on it from outside. The snake man’s assistant was attempting to shut us in. I took out my pistol and fired at the door. While I was at it, I fired twice into the tangle of floor snakes, and there was now a massed hissing combined with the seething of the rain and the creaking of the bamboo. The hissing was exactly like the noise made by a human audience that disapproves of the words of a speaker’s words. Heedless of snakes, with head down and eyes shut tight, I marched at the door and lunged thought it, gaining the foredeck; Deo Rana followed, and we stood there under the rain and the black sky. We were spinning forlornly in Tolly’s Nullah just as the smaller boat upstream had been set spinning by the rising waters. The snake man had vacated his post, but his chair remained. Of his young companion there was no sign. My bullet would have gone through the door; therefore I might have shot him into the water. I still held the Webley. On the black riverbank, I saw Sermon and Gopal the mali. Had Sermon attempted to come on board? Who had cast the boat off from its mooring? Had that been Sermon’s doing? Sermon was signing to us, indicating that we should jump for the bank, and the rotation of the boat would take us within leaping distance of the bank inside a few seconds . . . but I would not have the luxury of waiting, because with a mighty slap the python landed on the foredeck between Deo Rana and me. It was as if the weather gods had hurled down a giant snake, having concluded that the rain was not having a bad enough effect. I leapt as the beast began to flow over the deck boards, and I landed on the slimy bank, half in and halfout of Tolly’s Nullah. The water was warm, and slimy like oil, and I had to claw at the bank to drag myself out of it. Deo Rana made a better leap and he landed a few feet away. I had dropped my pistol as I landed, and Deo picked it up off the riverbank mud. I looked back at the boat. The snake man and his assistant had somehow transferred to the small aft deck. They must have scrambled over the roof of the cabin, and one of them must have pitched down the python from up there. But pythons were not venomous, so I supposed that was no worse than having a log pitched at you.
The snake men’s boat was now spinning away, receding behind a curtain of rain. Charles Sermon and the gardener, Gopal, were now walking away along the beach, heading downriver, back in the direction from which we’d all come; and they had been joined by a third man, who wore a tightly buttoned white mackintosh. Even through the swirling rain I could see that this newcomer was Professor Hedley Fleming, and I felt pride in having lured him here. I almost had a full complement of suspects.
I rose to my feet and, half-sodden, I approached these three.
‘Who cast the boat off?’
‘The young fellow,’ said Sermon. ‘I’m sorry, but I was rather distracted.’ Sermon indicated Fleming, saying, ‘I was just asking the doctor if he’d be good enough to explain his business here.’
Professor Hedley Fleming’s spectacles were steamed up by the storm, but that hardly mattered, since he seldom made eye contact anyway. Hedley Fleming was attempting to explain to Sermon his presence at the waterside. ‘Stringer here showed me his map. As far as I could gather, he seemed to think the site was significant in terms of the dealing in snakes.’
‘Did you see the boat?’ I said. ‘It was full of them.’
‘I daresay it was.’
I said, ‘You don’t think there’s anything queer about a boat-load of bloody snakes?’
Professor Hedley Fleming removed his glasses, and wiped them with a handkerchief, but not for the purposes of looking at me. Instead, he was looking down at my mud-soaked trousers. ‘Do you have any notion of how many snake charmers there are in this city?’ he demanded, ‘and how many snakes the average one of them gets through per mensem, never mind per annum?’