Word: python
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Lady Edith is feeling rather pipped, or she would shoot the python herself. From the reports of the villagers, it is a great, ropy beast-and it will creep forth to kill again after it recovers from a two-week digestive coma brought on by swallowing Lady Edith's cook. So Lady Edith, who runs an orphanage near Bihar, India, delegates the job of python stalking to a half-Indian, half-American Quaker youth named Peter Bruff. Though courageous, Peter is an abstracted, mystical young man. He is also a poet, and his work, a heroic poem about...
...most of Author Berry's exotic, expertly written comic novel, Peter is bivouacked in a native village while scouting his python. The chief's head wife plies him with roast bats, and the chief himself leeringly confides the secret which has enabled him to live (or so he says) for 237 years: "Copulate every day of your life." Most of the book's exuberant humor arises from the collision of Quakers, who (in the words of one of them) regard the body as "needed for the reproduction of Friends," and Hindus, who. Author Berry suggests, recoil...
...Post gets out at all is a minor miracle. Beneath a giant Moreton Bay fig tree in Port Moresby (pop. 7,000), the Post's termite-honeycombed headquarters has been flooded eight times during monsoons. Twice the composing room has been invaded by serpents-a ten-foot python, a rare and venomous taipan-which were pelted to death by ingots of type metal. One night a horde of winged ants, attracted by the lights, swarmed in to lay a living veneer on the Linotype machines, jam the works with their bodies; a mechanic imported from Australia...
Piccadilly Circus. In London, when the R.S.P.C.A. complained that she kept a mouse in a cage with a python, Pet Shop Owner Phyllis Cooper showed up in court with both animals, won dismissal by proving that they were practically buddies, provoked the prosecutor to comment: "In no other country would a mouse invoke the protection...
...rescue team's chief, Rupert Fothergill, 46, is mostly concerned with keeping his men alive. Fothergill himself has been bitten by a python and a rufus-beaked snake; one of his staff, while swimming, was bitten on the lip by a hissing sand snake. More than the animals and reptiles, Fothergill fears the dangers of diving into the lake where there is always the possibility of losing an eye on a tree branch or being impaled on a stake. Lions and elephants will be relatively easy to handle. Says Fothergill: "An elephant can swim a long way. It will...