The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c26.104

v1.c26.104

The snakes of India were a third arresting species in the animal world. And here again it was the size, in the case of pythons, which impressed the Europeans. Some were so large, Megasthenes wrote, as to swallow bulls whole⁴. The envoys coming from Abhisāra to the Macedonian camp asserted boldly that their rāja kept two serpents, 80 and 140 cubits long respectively (about 160 and 280 feet)⁵! On the other hand, Nearchus knew that the smaller poisonous snakes were the more dangerous, and described how life in India was burdened with the fear of finding them anywhere, ‘in tents, in vessels, in walls.’ Sometimes they infested a particular house to the point of making it uninhabitable. The charmers who went about the country were supposed to know how to cure snake-bites. There was really indeed very little for a doctor to do in India except to cure snake-bites, since diseases were so rare among Indians—so at least, as we shall see, the Greeks believed⁶. The Greeks also understood that there was some breed of flying snakes, which dropped from the air at night a poisonous secretion, corrupting the flesh of anyone upon whom it fell¹.