And there stands the giant to this day; or, at any rate, there stands a mountain as tall as he, and which bears his name; and when the thunder rumbles about its summit, we may imagine it to be the voice of giant Atlas bellowing after Hercules.
THE SERPENT AND THE COCKATRICE
By Pamela Cleaver
On the edge of the hot, sun-baked desert there was a beautiful oasis where a pool of cool, clear water was shaded by a green, leafy tree. In the branches of this tree, which bore clusters of succulent fruit as well as luxuriant foliage, lived an ancient serpent who spent most of her days coiled round a branch, waiting for travellers. She did not want to see travellers beneath the tree so that she could prey upon them—oh no, that was not her way; what she wanted was an audience, people to whom she could tell her tale.
As soon as weary travellers stopped beneath her tree she would slither down through the branches and engage them in conversation. Sometimes, of course, she frightened them, for a serpent is not the most comfortable of companions—but every so often she would find someone willing to listen to her and so she would begin.
“Lisssten,” she would say in her sibilant voice, “listen and I will tell you a doleful tale of how my sssorrow came upon me.
“Once, long ago, a hen laid an egg in thisss very oasis, but alas for her she did not have time to hatch it because the tribe of the Bedouin to whom she belonged moved on the next day, taking her with them. My mother, a handsome green and gold serpent like me, found the egg. She herself had just laid a clutch of four eggs and when she saw the hen’s egg lying in the sand she hissed a little, thinking it was one of her own eggs which had rolled away from the nest, for broody serpents are notoriously absent-minded and easily confused. Pushing the egg across the sand, guiding it with the tip of her sensitive tail, she rolled it to her nest and positioned it beside her own four eggs before settling down in coils to hatch them out.
“Now you would sssuppose, would you not,” the serpent would continue, fixing her gaze and staring into the eyes of her listener like a hypnotist, “that from a hen’s egg a chicken would emerge, however and by whomsoever it was hatched?”
Probably the listener would never have even thought about such a thing, but to humour the serpent he would agree.
“Ssss,” the serpent would hiss triumphantly, “then you would be wrong, it is not ssso. The hen’s egg, lovingly brooded by my mother, mysteriously absorbed some of her serpentine features through the shell and when the great day came upon which the shells cracked open, my mother found to her amazement that she had hatched three male serpents, one female (me), and a strange creature which was part chick and part worm.
“Her first instinct, as she told me in later years, was to destroy the monster she had hatched, but there was something about the little creature that appealed to her maternal instinct and she let him live and called him Cockatrice.
“As her family grew and flourished, my mother did not regret having let her foster child live, for he was truly handsome. His head was like that of a cockerel with a bright red comb and yellow beak; the dark, greeny-black feathers on his neck changed to iridescent green scales upon his breast which narrowed sharply into a sinuous, green and gold serpent’s body, ending in a barbed tail. His eyes were hooded and always half-closed—we thought at first it was because of the brightness of the sun, but there was another reason as you shall see.
“Every day my mother gave us lessons in sssurvival. She taught us how to catch our food, which things were good to eat and which would do us harm. She taught us how to move silently and to escape detection by skilful use of cover, she taught us how to defend ourselves if we were threatened, using our eyes to mesmerise and our venomous fangs to sting. ‘But you, my poor child,’ she said to our foster brother the cockatrice, ‘I do not know how you will protect yourself for although you are serpentine in your hinder parts, you are fowl in your front parts and therefore have nothing more lethal than a peck to offer your enemies’.
“Upon hearing this, the cockatrice began to laugh. ‘Come, mother,’ he said, ‘I will show you what I can do to protect myself,’ and, still laughing, he slid along the night-cooled sand until he came upon a desert rat frolicking in the moon’s light. ‘Stay behind me,’ he commanded softly, ‘and watch’.
“Sssslowly sliding forward, he advanced upon the rat, gave a soft crowing call to attract its attention and as it looked towards him, he opened his eyes wide and stared at the little rodent. An expression of astonishment showed on the animal’s face and then, quicker than lightning strikes, it became as still as a rock and turned to stone.
“The cockatrice hooded its eyes again and gave its eerie laugh. Our mother, hissing with surprise, slithered forward to examine the little statue. ‘Sssso,’ she said, ‘this is your gift and your defence. Take care, my son, always to use it wisely and never look upon anything that you love with your full gaze’.
“As time passed and we were all fully grown, our mother decided that the family should split up because there was not room enough in the oasis for all of us. Her sons, she said, should go out into the world and find new hunting grounds and I, as the only daughter should remain with her at the oasis until I married. My three serpent brothers thought this a fine plan and were anxious to set out and see more of the world, and the cockatrice, too, was keen to go—not only to see more of the world, but to be seen more often, for I am sorry to say he was very vain and thought himself the most handsome creature that had ever lived.
“Alasss, I encouraged him in this for I had fallen in love with him and told him constantly how elegant he looked, how handsome and how brave. It was not until long afterwards that I realised that ours was a rather one-sided love affair, for he only occasionally said that he loved me and told me that my green and gold scales were attractive. At the time I supposed he did not mention my looks often because he always saw me through half closed eyes, never looking at me directly so that he should not turn me to stone, but later I realised that so great was his vanity and his love for himself that there was little room in his heart for love of another.
“As the time for his departure drew close, I grew daily sadder and sadder. Bitter tears I shed at the thought of being parted from my darling cockatrice. My mother noticed my feelings and finally took the cockatrice on one side and told him of my love for him and said that if he married me she would depart in his place, giving the oasis to him for my dowry. The cockatrice agreed, and to my great joy he proposed to me and upon the next day we were married and we had a great feast to celebrate my wedding and the departure of my mother and brothers.
“Although I was a little sad to see them all go, the fact that I was now wife to the marvellous cockatrice soon made me happy again and I devoted every moment of my time to caring for him and fulfilling his every wish. In the evenings we would lie coiled companionably along the branches of the great tree while I told him over and over again how much I loved him, how beautiful he looked, how his feathers and scales shone and many other such foolish things as lovers delight in saying. He would sit and listen, preening his feathers and smoothing his scales with his beak, but although he accepted every extravagant compliment as his due, as time passed, he became discontented only hearing about his good looks and longed to see his beauty for himself instead of seeing it through my eyes.
“It ssso happened, not long after we were married, that one day a caravan of traders passed through our oasis and halted here at the same time as a rich tribe of nomads. There was much feasting and bargaining going on beneath our tree and the cockatrice and I watched all that went on with interested eyes. We saw lengths of gorgeous fabric exchanged for little discs of gold and silver, we saw sacks of flour and coffee change hands in return for goats and kids. We saw curiously wrought knives in tooled leather sheaths bartered for hand-thrown pottery and we saw many other things whose purpose we did not know.