The serpent crest of the king's crown, or
of the god's, on the pillars of Egypt, is a mystery, but the serpent
itself, gliding past the pillar's foot, is it less a mystery? Is there,
indeed, no tongue, except the mute forked flash from its lips, in that
running brook of horror on the ground?
68. Why that horror? We all feel it, yet how imaginative it is, how
disproportioned to the real strength of the creature! There is more
poison in an ill-kept drain, in a pool of dish-washing at a cottage door,
than in the deadliest asp of Nile. Every back yard which you look down
into from the railway as it carries you out by Vauxhall or Deptford,
holds its coiled serpent; all the walls of those ghastly suburbs are
enclosures of tank temples for serpent worship; yet you feel no horror in
looking down into them as you would if you saw the livid scales, and
lifted head. There is more venom, mortal, inevitable, in a single word,
sometimes, or in the gliding entrance of a wordless thought than ever
"vanti Libia con sua rena." But that horror is of the myth, not of the
creature.
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