The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński Page B

nearest hospital probably a day’s driving away—death would be inevitable. It was possible that at that very moment the cobra was in a state of light catalepsy (a condition of numbness and lethargy apparently typical of these reptiles), because it did not stir. My God, what should I do? I thought feverishly, by now completely wide awake.
    “Leo,” I whispered loudly. “Leo, a snake!”
    Leo had been in the car, getting our luggage out. We stared at each other silently, not knowing how to proceed. Yet time was running out: Were the cobra to awaken, it would probably attack instantly. Because we had no weapons of any kind, not even a machete, we decided that Leo would get a metal canister from the car and with it we would try to crush the cobra. It was a risky plan, but it was all we could come up with. We had to do something. Our inaction was giving the snake an advantage.
    The canisters, from old British army supplies, were large, with sharp, protruding edges. Leo, who was a powerful man, grabbed one and started to creep toward the hut. The cobra was still just lying there, motionless. Leo, grasping the canister by its handles, lifted it up and waited. He was calculating, positioning himself, aiming. I lay still as stone on the bunk, tense, ready. And then suddenly, in a split second, Leo, holding the canister before him, threw his entire weight upon the snake. At which moment I too fell with my whole body on top of him. In these seconds, our lives hung in the balance—we knew this. Actually, we only thought of it later, for the instant the canister, Leo, and I came down on top of the snake, the interior of the hut exploded.
    I never suspected there could be so much power within a single creature. Such terrifying, monstrous, cosmic power. I had assumed that the canister’s edge would easily cut through the snake—nothing of the kind! I now saw we had beneath us not a snake, but a throbbing, vibrating steel spring, impossible to either break or crush. The cobra was thrashing and pounding the ground with such demented fury that the hut’s interior grew dark from the dust. Under the powerful blows of its tail, the clay floor was crumbling and scattering, blinding us with clouds of debris. At one point it suddenly occurred to me with horror that we wouldn’t manage, that the reptile would slip out from under us and, in pain, wounded, enraged, would start to bite us. I pressed down even harder on my friend. He was groaning, his chest crushed against the canister, unable to breathe.
    Finally, but this took a long time, an eternity, the cobra’s blows started to lose their impetus, vigor, frequency. “Look,” Leo said. “Blood.” Indeed, into a crevice along the floor, which now resembled a shattered clay dish, a narrow trickle of blood was slowly seeping. The cobra was weakening, and the vibrations of the canister, which we felt the whole time and by means of which the snake signaled us about her pain and her hatred, vibrations that terrified and panicked us, were also diminishing. But now, when it was all over, when Leo and I rose and the dust began to settle and thin out and I gazed down again at the narrow ribbon of blood being quickly absorbed, instead of satisfaction and joy I felt an emptiness inside, and something else as well: I felt sad that that heart, which inhabited the very pit of hell we had all shared through a bizarre coincidence only a moment ago, that that heart had stopped beating.
    The next day we stumbled upon a wide, rust-colored track that, in a wide arc, circumscribed Lake Victoria. Driving several hundred kilometers through a green, luxuriant, fertile Africa, we reached the Ugandan border. It wasn’t really a border. A simple shed stood by the side of the road, with the sign “Uganda” burned out on a wooden board above the door. The shed was empty and shuttered. The kinds of borders for which blood is spilled were still to come into being.
    We drove on. Night had already fallen.