Word: mambas
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...music that is successful opera. Rorem's struggle, in fact, is a classic example of the peculiar agony that creating an opera can be. When he got the Ford Foundation's grant four years ago, he first tried a setting of DuBose Heyward's novel Mamba's Daughters, was deep into it when the project had to be scuttled be cause of copyright problems. Then he tackled an original libretto by a friend, entitled The Cave. But alas, says Rorem, "after I had finished the whole thing, nobody knew what it was all about, including...
...years in Africa, Ionides has lived for ten days on the partial contents of two ostrich eggs, been trampled by a charging elephant resulting in total deafness of one ear, climbed a 100-ft. tree, despite acrophobia, and with only one arm free, brought down a writhing mamba. He has been bitten by snakes half a dozen times, recorded his numbed sensations and degrees of pain with cool scientific exactitude, and never used antivenin. He has had an entire native village flogged for disobedience and has no qualms about flogging ("It is simple and effective and very widely understood...
...feeding white mice to the snakes, had presented dinner to an African spitting cobra, a green mamba and two Indian cobras. In the fourth cage were two tiger snakes. They had to be separated to prevent a fight to the death over food. With his "hook," a sawed-off golf club with a fork at the end, Ken tried to catch the smaller snake. It slithered away, and for a moment he overlooked its 3-ft. cage mate, coiled by the door on Ken's blind side (he lost the sight of his right eye as a child...
...equatorial sun beat down mercilessly, and birds of prey swooped in for unprecedented feasts. There are few baby monkeys or baboons-most have been eaten, some by their own species. The desperate monkeys gnaw the bark of their tree roosts and even attack the poisonous black mamba snake, from which they ordinarily flee in terror...
...Pillowcase. To capture the deadly black mamba, the wardens use a fishing rod adapted to pull a noose around the snake's neck; the snake is then gingerly deposited in a pillowcase. Dassies (shrill-voiced, rabbity creatures, distantly related to the elephant) and porcupines are deliberately driven into the water since, despite their small size, dassies bite when cornered and porcupines are armed with quills. Even in the water, it takes three men to outwit a porcupine...