Among all the many rare objects that I have at home, one stands out for its mystery and exoticism. ankus Indian or ankusa, a short elephant goad, the traditional instrument used by mahouts or mahouts, the drivers of the pachyderms, to control them. It's like a small boat hook. It was given to me by my mother-in-law who had acquired it many years ago on a trip with her husband to India and she thought that it would excite me more than a watch or a tie, and she was certainly not wrong. My ankus, with a painted wooden handle and a bronze tip with a hook adorned with the figure of a small elephant, is not at the level of the precious and valuable ones that can be seen in the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert or the Metropolitan, worthy ceremonial pieces of the Delhi Durbar and authentic works of art, but it is a beautiful object. Although it cannot be forgotten that, like a riding crop, a whip or spurs, it was created with the purpose of inflicting harm on a sentient being. The mahoutswho have handled elephants for centuries—used as pack and work animals and prestigious and prestigious mounts. shikar (hunting) in Asia—they use them by sticking the spike into the most sensitive parts of the animal such as the mouth and the part behind the ears. Curiously, when I see my ankus, that mute storyteller, I think less about elephants than about snakes, especially a huge white cobra…
A valuable elephant goad, it will be remembered, is the central object of the plot of one of Mogwli's most exciting adventures in The jungle book (specifically in The second jungle book appeared a year after the first, in 1895, with more stories): The king's ankus. For me, that story has something very special and always puts me on the verge of tears. I couldn't explain exactly why, but it has to do with the melancholic sense of wonder that the story inspires and the abysmal sadness that the protagonist cobra and her fate provoke in me. In the story, Mowgli comes to congratulate kaathe enormous python that lives in La Peña, because of its change of skin (it has already had two hundred) and while they are bathing together, because they are great friends – you have to see in what beautiful way Kipling describes that friendship, so enviable for all that we have a snake that is not very playful, although it is also called kaa—, the python tells him about a very special cobra that he has met in the Cold Houses, the old abandoned city where they already lived intense hours with the monkeys. That snake, “of the Poisonous People that carries death in its front teeth,” is a White Hood, a white cobra, “old as the jungle itself” (and cousin of Zumosol of the Nag and Nagaina of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi), and says kaa to Mowgli who spoke to him of things greater than all his knowledge. So, the Little Man piqued by curiosity, the two of them go there.
They arrive at the Cold Abodes, solitary and silent, illuminated by the moon, and from the ruins of the queen's pavilion they access a buried underground staircase to a large cavern or basement whose vaulted ceiling is pierced by tree roots. A gloomy, dark and sinister place where nothing can be seen. “Am I nothing?” he then says, standing before Mowgli, “the most enormous cobra that his eyes have ever seen… an animal about eight feet long and discolored from being always in darkness, until it has taken on a certain appearance like of old ivory.” Even the spectacle-shaped markings he wore on his extended hood, we are told, had faded and were now pale yellow. “He had eyes like two rubies and in short he offered the most surprising appearance that can be found.” Kipling knew about snakes: in the prologue of The jungle book thanks for his information “one of the main herpetologists of northern India, a daring and independent researcher who”, he adds ominously, “resolved not to live but to know, sacrificed his life to the study of the thanatophidia Oriental”.
The old cobra, who has been killing intruders for years, asks for news of the city above, the city of a hundred elephants and twenty thousand horses, the city of the King of twenty kings. And she believes that she has gone deaf because she no longer hears the bustle and the drums of war. Mowgli doesn't understand anything (he doesn't even know what a king is), but kaa He tries to compassionately explain to the cobra that the city no longer exists and above there there is nothing but the jungle taken over by the ruins. The cobra refuses to believe it. She is the guardian of the King's treasure since Kurrum Rajah, she explains, imprisoned her there when her skin was dark. And it continues to protect the countless riches—gold and silver coins in a five-foot-thick layer in which are half-submerged jewel-encrusted elephant pavilions, royal palanquins, cuirasses and helmets, and piles of precious stones, plus some dull skulls—, over which it patrols dragging its scaly belly. She refuses to accept what they tell her. “I never change. Until the stone is lifted up again and the Brahmins come down singing songs that I know, and they feed me with hot milk, and the treasures are brought to light again, I will remain here.” She always makes me think of my father when he was already losing his mind but he kept cutting out newspapers and trying to write his book. Mowgli wanders around looking for something useful under the cobra's murderous gaze and finds a ankus magnificent, with an ivory handle and adorned with rubies, emeralds and turquoises. That object, which the boy takes because he wants to see how it shines in the sun, will cause a chain of deaths. But the most dramatic part of the story is when the great cobra pounces on Mowgli and he discovers that the snake can no longer kill: the fangs are black and consumed in the gum, and it no longer has poison. It is dry. The cobra, embarrassed, asks to be killed, and while his visitors leave, he remains in his lair, prison and grave hissing and cursing madly. And there he continues.
I never met Kipling (so I couldn't talk to him about snakes, or Kafiristan, for that matter), but I did meet Patrick O'Brian, with whom I was friends (at times). And you will say, what does the great writer of maritime novels do here when we are talking about elephants, ankus and do you charge? Beyond the fact that Kipling also wrote fearless captainsit turns out that O'Brian has a beautiful novel very far from the sea and in which elephants appear, precisely, ankus and even a white cobra!, a snake that also causes great sadness. It's about the book Hussein, the mahut (Edhasa, 2009), a work of youth (1938, thirty years before Sea and war captain), in which the budding O'Brian (signing under his real name of Patrick Russ) went Kiplinesque and chronicled the life and adventures of an elephant driver from the Raj as a child. In the book—translated by my sister Patricia, who very orthodoxly changes the word ankus, which O'Brian uses in the original, for “focino” (RAE: “goad with a somewhat curved tip with which the elephant is governed and governed”)—, the author strings together tasty stories in the manner of the One thousand and One Nights from Husein, Toomai's emulator and member of a dynasty of mahuts, who learns the traditions of elephant handling, including the language of the trade, Hathi. The boy, enrolled in the government's public works service with elephants, faces pachyderms that suffer from mustthe hormonal spike that drives them crazy, to dacoits (bandits), wild dogs, a leopard, a rhinoceros and even a man-eating tiger. Always with the help of his faithful companion, the unforgettable elephant Jengahir.
And now comes the curious thing: during a bad time in which he had to pawn up to ankus (good old Husein, O'Brian tells us, does not use it and only carries it as a sign of his profession), the boy dedicates himself to being a snake charmer and a specialist in cleaning the houses of the sahibs of ophidians, which he has previously put in (you have to earn a living). And she carries an extraordinary white cobra—“of the purest white, with no other mark than Shiva's glasses on the hood”—that she has inherited from an old charmer who stole it from a village in Gujarat where she was venerated as the incarnation of a god. . Hussein carries the serpent, called Vakrihsna, with red eyes and whom he greatly appreciates, wrapped around his waist, which is already the way to carry a cobra. That saves the boy's life when they attack him with a knife that sticks into the poor reptile. O'Brian had not been to India when he wrote the novel, but he had certainly read Kipling…
When they reproach me at home for having too many things (another day I will tell them, or have I already done so?, about the big stuffed spider and the salacots), I hold on to my old ankus and I take refuge between my books and my snake while I sing under my breath. Jungle Song: “This is the hour, strength and pride, sharp claw, cautious silence.” And I tell myself that one day I have to visit old White Hood, to see how she is doing.
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