SOME YEARS AGO, BEFORE the era of “reality” television, I was associate producer of a series entitled Courage. We went under the seas with skin divers, climbed mountains, stalked polar bears, that sort of thing. Perhaps, when you were younger, you saw the show; many Americans did—though not multimillions of them, which is the principal reason we lasted only two seasons. Perhaps you even enjoyed it. If so, it is not my intention to reflect disdainfully on your taste when I herewith reveal publicly for the first time that certain portions of it were faked. We used motion-picture film in those days.
For example: the camera, hand-held by a crew member wearing waders, followed an anaconda across that Paraguayan pond and onto the far bank, whereupon the serpent turned and gave battle, flinging its giant coils around our Indian guide, and had all but choked the life out of him when, with a final desperate slash with his machete, he cut himself free—though, in deference to the snake lobby (already influential if not as vocal as it is today), that conclusion had to be inferred by the audience: no reptile was hurt, not even the phony one we used for most of the footage.
The living anaconda, which had taken our real guides a month to locate, soon vanished into the impenetrable swamps after we had gotten all too little of it on film. Despite its size, this serpent is anyway not the ferocious creature depicted in Hollywood potboilers, seldom taking on an adversary larger than a chicken, and remains as torpid as a garden hose for days after a meal—unless of course pursued by a TV crew, from which it flees in terror. In the wrestling match presented on our show, the antagonists were a thirty-foot anaconda made of foam rubber and a New York actor stained to represent a native guide; the jungle pond was a tank in a studio in Spanish Harlem.
The film as aired, genuine and simulated sequences intermixed, looked convincing enough for those days. As I remember, the only complaints we received were from snake-lovers who, despite the aforementioned pains we had taken to avoid offending them (which included an affidavit from a leading animal-rights group, appearing as a graphic on the screen), insisted that living reptiles had been mutilated for purposes of entertainment.
Octopus-fanciers were heard from after our skin-diver show, and a record number of written, phoned, or telegraphed protests (imagine what the volume of emails might have been; luckily the internet was a thing of the future) were provoked by our simulated killing of a reputed man-eating lion in Kenya. For the latter, we had used some old movie footage in which a Hollywood animal, toothless and nearly senile, collapsed on a cue from his off-camera trainer. Our worry had been only that sequence would be recognized by those hosts of viewers who had lately seen it on the television revivals of the ancient Tarzan movies.
It was not so identified. I cannot recall a single complaint on that or any other similar score. No one seemed offended by fakery in itself. We were never taken to task for falsely promising that which we had no intention of delivering: real human beings in genuinely extreme situations. Either the man was bogus, at least in the role portrayed, or the experience was rigged so as to render it harmless.
So much by way of introduction to the account of an incident in which the values were precisely reversed. Though every moment of this episode was recorded by our cameras, for obvious reasons the film could never be shown. Presented on the home screen, within rigid limitations of space and time and interrupted by commercial messages and station breaks, this remarkable event would have seemed pointless except as a cruel mockery of the moral proposition on which our show was based: that the intrepid man invariably vanquishes the menace; to put it crudely, that bravery pays off.
We, the staff and crew of Courage, were in Southeast Asia at the time. I shall not give the name of the country; it had but lately achieved its independence from a European colonial power, and was suffering the usual elation, pains, and doubts of such a status. There were riots in the capital city, buckets of filth were hurled over the wells surrounding the U.S. Embassy, and from time to time homemade bombs were lobbed into outdoor cafes by dissident elements.
I sat in such an establishment one afternoon with Bud Servo, our executive producer and my superior, who was naturally of the liberal persuasion but for his own reasons when abroad often posed as the vulgar, aggressive American whom he ritualistically deplored. At the moment he was loudly calling for ice with which to cool his nugi, a local sort of beer made from the fermented juice of some jungle flower. This potation was properly drunk just after it had been heated to the simmering point and decanted into tiny stone cups—a practice of which Bud was well aware.
“Hey, boy,” he cried to our waiter, an ancient, coffee-colored individual dressed in a striped sarong bottom. There were dark looks from nearby tables. Many of the non-Caucasian clientele wore the Nationalist costume of white-canvas mess jacket and trousers and fore-and-aft cap.
My visible embarrassment only caused Bud to shout the louder. As the Nationalists began to hiss in indignation, a shabby little man, his mahogany face pitted with scars, sidled up to our table and said: “Surr, you buy Jairmon camera?”
“I’ll buy ten,” said Bud, reaching for his money clip.
“Amee schleepok!” screamed the little man, meaning “American swine,” or the like—I had learned that much of the language—dropped the camera to the table, where it exploded with a great noise, broke all our nugi cups, and filled the area with pungent smoke. But oddly enough, as we discovered upon arising and shaking out our clothes, hurt no human being.
The Nationalists now made a handsome gesture, coming en bloc to apologize. They were concerned that we should form a negative opinion of their country on the basis of this single incident. Their spokesman, in serviceable though quaint English, blamed the “rude lot of revolutionist hooligans” for our inconvenience, and assured us that the vast majority of his fellow countrymen were of the democratic persuasion.
The upshot was that Bud proceeded to stand them several rounds of nugi, discoursed at length on the economic affairs of the country—with which he had somewhere acquired an astonishing familiarity—and eventually went off in their company to one of the twenty-seven-course dinners that were a local specialty.
Bud confessed to me next day that the little “hooligan” had been in his employ, had been furnished with the harmless camera-bomb and paid to detonate it on our table. Only in such a fashion, Bud had felt, could he genuinely make contact with the citizenry.
“You’ve got to neutralize their basic hostility,” he said. “Now that we have become victims, we will be trusted.”
All I can say is that it worked, as Bud’s contrivances usually did. He had obtained from his new friends a number of recommendations to chieftains and headmen in the back country without which we could not have got far. We had come to this land to do a single show, on tiger hunting, but now Bud envisioned at least three additional programs treating the pursuit of, respectively, the giant squid that infested the coastal waters; the gaur, a kind of wild cow and formidable as the Cape buffalo; and finally and foremost, the king cobra.
Bud had always had a partiality towards snakes as a theme for Courage. No wild thing more intrigues an audience than a reptile. You start with the instinctive response of horror and dread that is universally felt by human beings for that which squirms and writhes; add to that the lethal properties of the dangerous serpents and you have something to conjure with.
Now, we had already done the anaconda show, but as yet we had not brought to fruition a sequence concerning venomous snakes, among which the king cobra is pre-eminent: the largest in the world, growing sometimes to exceed eighteen feet, and the most potent; its bite has been known to kill an elephant, if administered to the tender tip of the trunk.
On the list of persons to contact in the provinces, given Bud by his newfound friends, appeared the name of one Dr. Poon; specialty, King Cobra; address, “west of Duala Kum, Southeast Province.” In the margin opposite these data, Bud’s informants had noted, “controversial individual.”
I pointed this out to Bud as we supervised the loading of our equipment onto the Land Rovers amid the red dust of the capital’s main thoroughfare. Nearby, a man in a dirty turban lashed the emaciated ox that pulled his cart, and we were surrounded by beseeching brown urchins.
“Dr. Poon,” said Bud, “has an ambivalent reputation. He claims to have developed a concoction, to be taken orally, which provides absolute immunity to cobra venom. I have return cables from the top herpetologists of the U.S., Europe, and Germany, who term him without qualification as a fraud. But,” Bud went on, wiping the sweatband of his Norm Thompson safari hat, “Dr. Poon’s own countrymen swear by him. Now you can sneer and call them ignorant wogs, but I say let’s catch his act before we read him off. After all, these people have lived with cobras all their lives.”
It took us five days of hard travel to reach the city of Duala Kum over the so-called national highway which throughout much of its length was hardly better than a cow path, crossing desert, jungle, mountain, and swamp—the entire series in every fifty miles, or so it seemed in the ghastly heat and chockful as we were of antibiotics, vitamin reinforcements, and other preventatives of Asiatic maladies.
In certain marshy places not even the four-wheel drive of the doughty Land Rovers sufficed to keep us moving, and more than once we had to send forward or to the rear for towing service, which in these parts meant an elephant, commandeered by a native with a steel hook. At sunset we made camp just off the highway, when that was feasible; when not, upon the road itself; there was so little traffic. Mosquitoes hereabout were big as grasshoppers. Occasionally we thought we heard a tiger cough in the distance.
Duala Kum, capital of the Southeast Province, consisted of a cluster of wicker cottages surrounding one termite-gnawed structure of wood. Bud had sent a native porter ahead to announce our arrival, and a welcoming committee, complete with a band of bamboo flutes and homemade drums, greeted us as we hauled up in the municipal square. After a concert, fortunately brief, we were led into the wooden building, which proved to be the gubernatorial palace, and received by the provincial governor, a huge, rotund, hairless, relentlessly grinning man of mocha hue, named Lu Pok. He was soon revealed as a singular combination of what I can only call Eastern guile and Western vulgarity. The latter no doubt was the result of his two years as an exchange student at a teacher’s college somewhere in rural Indiana, in the early nineteen fifties. He had apparently watched a good deal of TV during that period, and prominent upon his office wall was an eight-by-ten glossy of an overblown blonde personality of those early days in television. An inscription to “My friend Lu Pok” ran across her abundant mammaries.
“And how goes it with Miss Trixie in these days?” asked the governor, indicating the photograph and our chairs with the same graceful gesture of his fat arm.
She had vanished from the national networks a decade since, to open supermarkets and perform at county fairs, but Bud of course was quick to convey her personal greetings to Lu Pok.
A tiny pink lizard scuttled up the wall behind the governor’s huge, cropped brown head. A tattered ceiling fan, operated through a series of crude pulleys and fraying ropes by a breech-clothed lackey who sat on the ground outside, stirred occasional gusts of air and stench upon us.
“My goodness, how one is taken back in the memory to joys of one’s undergraduate,” said Lu Pok. “Hotdogs and melted milks. At the bathing pools, ladies’ legs bared. Whereas the bosom, which in my country is of no erotic interest, in yours is kept ever swathed.”
As if to accentuate his point, at this moment two bare-breasted maidens entered the room and served us cups of brackish green tea.
“One trusts,” said Lu Pok, having sipped loudly from the cup and wiped his great mouth, “the film you are about to make will prove profitable. One can assure you that the license fees to operate a motion-picture camera in the Southeastern Province are modest, and one’s own brother owns appropriate terrain for any type of setting: jungle, plain, mountain; the rental being exceedingly reasonable.”
“However,” Bud said when the interview was finished and we had moved into the wicker huts assigned us as lodging, “that fat bastard has us by the short hairs. Did you hear his threat that guerillas would burn our transport on any land not rented from his brother?”
“Well,” said I, “I think you called his bluff.”
An explosion outside made my statement valueless. We dashed into the clearing to watch one of the Land Rovers burn vigorously while the members of the erstwhile welcoming delegation stood about unconcernedly chewing betel nut and spitting red. Luckily it was not the car that contained the cameras. Nevertheless, the loss was substantial in sleeping bags and tinned food.
Within a few moments after the flames at last died away and it was clear that the entire vehicle must be written off, Bud requested another audience with Lu Pok. This time the governor received us in his steam bath, a tightly woven straw enclosure in the back yard of the “palace,” where he sat stark naked while servant girls, dressed only in abbreviated shirts, poured cold water on hot stones. Clouds of mist swept over his mountainous form, and torrents of perspiration rolled down his fat breasts and the rubbery horizontal folds giving way to the great convex of his belly.
Bud and I were both deftly stripped by the girls and shown to dried-grass carpets flanking Lu Pok. My own embarrassment was relieved by a certain sense of satisfaction that for once Bud had met more than his match.
“Your Excellency,” said Bud, “we won’t give you any trouble about the license fee, but I should make clear our purpose in visiting your beautiful province.” He shifted on his hams, for the mats were ungodly hot. “It is not to make the Hollywood-type motion picture nor the New York-type television show with which you are familiar from your days in the U.S.A. It Is rather to pursue our long search for situations in which man meets and overcomes a true-life experience of the greatest danger.”
A servant girl leaned across Bud and sponged his brow, while another did the same for me, her firm nipples against my upper arm.
“I am afraid, much as we would like to oblige your brother,” Bud continued, “our interest is confined to one individual in this region. Excellency, we made this long trip in general to encounter and vanquish the king cobra, and in specific to meet your remarkable fellow countryman Dr. Poon.”
“Ah,” answered Lu Pok with a grimace, “then your effort will be contradictory, for Poon has totally eliminated the danger of cobra. Through his work cobra is now harmless as a lark.”
“Yes,” Bud doggedly insisted, “we want to meet Dr. Poon as soon as possible. So you see, Excellency, we’ll have to pass up the opportunity to make an arrangement with your brother.”
“Not at all, my dear chap,” said Lu Pok, making his narrow eyes vanish in amusement. “Poon is my brother.”
At that moment the girls brought in several containers of cold water and drenched us all. After the initial shock it proved greatly refreshing. Then they briskly toweled us dry. My winsome helper, even more attractive than Bud’s, was very adept with her birdlike hands. I should have liked to know her better, but after polishing Lu Pok’s brown hide to a sheen, the girls helped him into a pair of underdrawers made of fine linen and both accompanied him into the gubernatorial residence. Perhaps they were his wives.
Next morning as we set out for Dr. Poon’s compound, fourteen kilometers to the west of Duala Kum, we came upon the governor’s car, an ancient American sedan, which stood blocking the one-lane national highway. Lu Pok filled the entire rear seat. He wore his full-dress uniform: billed cap and a white tunic the massive chest of which was covered with multicolored decorations.
“One would,” he said gravely, “consider it shameful not to conduct you personally to one’s brother.” He directed his naked chauffeur to put the car in motion, which was done with chatters and squeaks and billowing clouds of smoke. In such fashion and at a speed of some eight miles per hour we were led along the washboard road towards the great authority on cobra.
The trip consumed the better part of the morning. Twice we had to stop and clear the road of teak-log obstructions placed thereon, according to Lu Pok, by insurgents. And through a particularly dense stretch of jungle, where the trees joined above the highway, we endured a fusillade of nuts hurled by orangutans who were enraged by our invasion.
We parked on the highway and walked in the last mile to Dr. Poon’s on a narrow, tortuous jungle trail that hummed with insects. Lu Pok elected to bring up the rear, sending his chauffeur ahead with a machete to out obstructing vines and point out pools of quicksand. Bud had forgotten, or was too cheap, to hire a sufficient number of native porters; and sweating under their heavy burdens of equipment, our crew swore to bring the matter before their union when we got back to New York.
But finally the jungle gave way to wiry brush, then the brush opened on a rolling savannah of tawny grass above which rose the thatched roof of Dr. Poon’s laboratory.
Lu Pok swept up to join Bud and me in the vanguard. “To wait here is highly advisable,” he warned. “Poon is utterly deaf, like his cobra, but again like the reptiles he can detect ground vibrations at inordinate distances. So large a party has never before come to visit him. Unless approached circumspectly, he may have recourse to some desperate measure. As with all geniuses, he is eccentric.”
Bud was somewhat unnerved, but had enough presence of mind to order the cameras to roll from the moment the governor moved towards his brother’s building. Lu Pok’s great body, in its white uniform, went across the clearing for a hundred yards. He paused before the long building, then, a grotesque image through the field glasses, stole on tiptoe to the void of the entranceway and peeped within, bending at such an extreme angle that his figure seemed to end at the buttocks.
Waves of midday heat shimmered above the field like flights of translucent insects. All about us lay menacing silence; even the flies had gone. My clothes, soaked through, clasped me insidiously.
His face like a wet orange, Bud said to me: “I don’t like it.”
Then, behind us, Walt Riley, the chief cameraman, screamed like a woman, and I turned to see the flat head of a cobra staring at him from above the grass tops, which hereabout rose beyond our waists. The specimen must have exceeded ten feet in length, and, I realised later, probably stared in curiosity, not malice, its hood unflared.
But Bud brought forth a small pistol from under his bush jacket and proceeded to blaze away. I had not been aware until this moment that he carried a weapon. He missed with six shots, though clipping grass on either side of his target. The cobra’s head never wavered: that was the frightening thing to me at the moment. I did not then appreciate the fact of its deafness.
In its own good time, the snake eventually sank out of sigh, and shortly thereafter, Lu Pok reappeared at the door of the straw building and called across to us. As we moved towards him, I saw Bud desperately reloading the nickel-plated revolver, dropping more shells than he placed.
I protested, and he cried, with snapping teeth in a face blanched with hysteria, “Don’t you see it’s a trap?”
He broke from us and ran across the field, brandishing his tiny weapon. Sickly I watched him close on Lu Pok, and breathed relief when the governor’s great hand came up and then descended in a precise karate blow to the neck, which felled my executive producer.
“Poor devil,” said Lu Pok when I arrived. He shook his massive head. Bud lay flat, but the red dust was stirred by suspirations from his half-open mouth. Walt Riley, now recovered from his fright, knelt for a close-up while the other two cameramen panned over the governor and me from various angles. It was curious that, with all the excitement, only Bud Servo acted unprofessionally. Lu Pok directed his chauffeur to attend to the fallen, and said to me: “Come and meet Poon.”
I have known more easy momenta than that in which I entered the dim coolness of Dr. Poon’s laboratory and walked across its rush-strewn, earthen floor, expecting momentarily to tread upon a reptile. But my apprehensions proved needless. Other than the usual small lizards that prowled the buildings in this region, and the insects on which they fed, no living thing met my eye but a diminutive brown man sitting at a bamboo table which stood against the far wall. Dressed in loose white garments like a coolie, he sat rigidly staring through an open window that looked onto a stretch of dense brush.
“Poon is meditating,” said Lu Pok. “He is not yet aware of one’s presence.” The governor stamped his weighty foot, and the little man’s head began to turn slowly in our direction. He had the typical wide, bland face of his countrymen and short-cropped black hair, but his eyes were striking: hyperthyroid, turretlike, they looked as if capable of seeing independently of each other. At the moment, one seemed to be fastened upon me, while the other stared at Lu Pok.
“To tell him what’s what,” the governor said to me as he simultaneously fluttered his fat hands at his brother, in what was apparently their private sign language. “Poon can read lips, but prefers this mode of communication when emerging from contemplative pursuits.”
Both of Poon’s eyes suddenly focused on me, and he began furiously to shout in a high, almost animal voice, beads of saliva flying from his brown lips.
I recoiled against Lu Pok; it felt as though I had backed into a wall.
“Tell him,” I hastened to say, “that our intentions are honorable.”
The governor proceeded to translate his brother’s denunciation. “He says Westerners come only to mock him. He says your scientists know nothing of cobra. Etcetera.” Lu Pok’s smile was superficially apologetic; actually, I saw quite clearly that he enjoyed transmitting an attack on white men without flouting the conventions of diplomacy.
“Sir,” I said to the governor, ostensibly for transmission to his brother, “you may be right in your hostility to us, but the fact remains that we will pay a thousand U.S. dollars to see your cure for cobra bite.”
In his greed the governor did not bother to simulate a discussion of the terms with Poon, but said immediately. “Fifteen hundred. For which my brother will cause a snake to strike him, then apply his cure and recover, all in the sight of the camera.”
“O.K., but no con!” It was not I who spoke: Bud Servo stood in the doorway, shaken, pale, unarmed, but more or less himself again, and naturally showing no shame
Lu Pok communicated with Poon, who had since fallen back into his dreamy silence, and the little scientist, if he could be so termed, rose and in a bow-legged stride led us out into the ruthless sunlight. He resembled Lu Pok in no feature, being in every particular but his bulbous eyes exceptionally small and finely made; whereas the governor was huge in all but the slits through which his crafty vision passed. Perhaps they were not even blood relatives, if indeed that consideration matters when all is said and done.
The cameras picked us up when we four emerged from the building. I have my own print of the film and in later days I viewed it many times. I suspect my direct memory of the experience is by now inextricably intermingled with the cinematic representation—I see the event as if I were not involved, as art and not life. I see the three of us follow Poon behind the building: Bud’s disheveled figure; my own rather rigid form, walking as though on a surface of broken glass; then the broad back of Lu Pok, surmounted by his brown neck, juglike ears, officer’s cap that sweeps up and forward like a reversed wing.
Poon stops at a cluster of large, tightly woven wicker baskets. Removes the top of one, stares bulbously within. Makes fluttering motions with hand. Slowly, slowly comes into view the head of a cobra, glittering eyes, blunt muzzle. The scene is suddenly blurred, owing either to Walt Riley’s wavering hand on the camera or to my own temporary agitation: as I warned, I am shuttling between reality and film here. But in the realm of the actual, I remember Bud Servo’s intrusion at this point.
“A ringer,” he said, sneering at the reptile though keeping well back. “Defanged, poison sacs removed. I’ll never buy this, Pok.”
The governor softly replied: “Then let it strike yourself, dear sir.”
Dr. Poon had now extended a dark, twiglike finger and was caressing the snake’s throat ever so gently—and I ask you to believe that the cobra, given the anatomical difference, was reacting much as might a dog, arching its slender neck, swallowing with a glimpse of wet mouth, and had it been equipped with eyelids I am sure it would have closed them in pleasure. Then all at once Poon made a little brown fist and punched the snake lightly but firmly in the snout. Instantly its head drooped into the basket. Then up rose the reptile again, up, up, terrifyingly up, a good foot beyond the height of Dr. Poon, its head now a tiny bump tapering off into the wide flat flare of the hood, but the eyes were evident, enraged, and horribly aware. It wavered above Poon, and the little man stood firm, giving as good a stare as he received. This subtle battle of eyes was not to be measured in time. On film it consumes no more than six seconds. But there is an area in my memory in which it continues still, Dr. Poon and the cobra, forever frozen in their heroic exchange, man against nature, good versus evil, the preservative principle in opposition to the destructive.
Then Poon put forward his left wrist and the cobra struck it, not so fast as one might have thought, but with a force that drove the whole arm back, twisting the Doctor’s little body, and I saw Poon wince, show his own teeth, as the fangs hooked him. And the beast hung on, actually chewing into the wound, enlarging it for entry of the venom. The sight was unbearable. I averted my head, and in so doing noticed Lu Pok. If I had to characterize the violent feeling that contorted his features and bleached his swarthiness, in all truth I must say it was envy rather than sympathy, mixed with more brutal gratification than horror.
Bud maintained his stupor. Yet on the film he looks poised, alert, capable. And unless one peers closely, Poon himself shows up as a dusky little gardener, watering a lawn with a recalcitrant hose.
In its own good time the cobra was drained of venom and rage, disengaged its teeth from the Doctor’s arm, retracted its hood, sank back into the basket until only the head remained in view, turned that hither and yon like a periscope, and then gave Poon what I swear was a shy, demure look, an almost loving glance. In return the Doctor saluted the serpent with a waggle of the hand, the traditional goodbye in this section of Asia, loose wrist, floppy fingers, but there was more than courtesy in the gesture, perhaps even more than affection.
Thereupon Poon returned briskly to the laboratory, dusted his wound with a saffron-colored powder, drank an ounce of colorless liquid, lay down on a bamboo cot, and stared through his protuberant eyes at the ceiling. Our crew had started the portable generator and set up the lights for interior shooting. Poon was bathed in the glare. By contrast we others stood in shadow. The first nine minutes were more difficult to endure than anything that had gone before. Drops of sweat coursed my backbone like spiders, a nerve throbbed in my big toe. To my left, Bud alternated from foot to foot as if the earthen floor were aflame. I could sense behind me the bulk of Lu Pok, and occasionally I could hear a distant rumble in his vast gut.
But Dr. Poon lay calm, or so it looked, his breathing regular, his color somewhat pale in the light but in no respect ill, and even his bulging ayes were serene. All minor sounds were obliterated by the hoarse noise of the generator’s gasoline engine, just outside.
I say nine minutes—Bud later provided this statistic, for in the midst of everything he somehow remembered his watch.
Then Dr. Poon died.
Cobra venom works on the nervous, rather than the circulatory, system. Paralysis comes soon, and the heart stops beating. It is apparently not a painful end. At a certain point, Dr. Poon closed his eyes and breathed no more. In actuality the incident looked precisely as it does on the film.
Was there any sound evidence that Poon’s antidote had ever worked? Or had we watched the failure of its first trial? Was his reputation, well established throughout his own country, wholly a matter of hearsay, superstition, chauvinism, and other unscientific factors?
Perhaps it was to answer such questions that Lu Pok included in Poon’s funeral ceremonies, two days later, a peculiar demonstration. The obsequies began with moan of flutes, thud of drums, and the wail of fifty professional mourners assembled in the village square. Towering above them was a pyramid of dry brush upon a substructure of teak logs, surmounted by the rigid form of the little doctor wrapped in clean linen. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand natives came in from elsewhere throughout the Southeast Province, and what passed for streets in the little capital were thronged with pungent, chattering humanity. Nugi vendors set up their stands along the highway, and on spits above a long trench of hot coals turned the roasting bodies of three fat boars.
The sun was low on the evening horizon when Lu Pok mounted a bamboo platform and began his eulogy. Contrary to my expectation, it was not long. First he spoke briefly in his own language, and then presumably said the same in English, for our benefit. The significant passages, as I remember, were these:
“Poon was a great man, a dedicated man, a wise man, but we owe it to ourselves to understand that he was, through no fault of his personal responsibility perhaps, a limited individual, a primitive soul. So to speak, Poon looked to the sunset rather than the dawn. To our American friends he was a curiosity rather than the sort of fellow who had gained the status of a colleague.”
Lu Pok smiled at us across the dark heads of his surrounding countrymen—somewhat obsequiously, I thought.
“In the presence of modernity, Poon’s old powers failed him. Cobra he had defeated many times, but with contemporary reality he could not cope. How, through the generosity of our friends, who are providing U.S. dollars for the purpose, a modern laboratory, a brick building, will arise on the site of Poon’s jungle hut.”
On these words the crowd turned as one man and looked at us through many pairs of dark eyes. Bud reluctantly opened his shirt, took a fat handful of cash from a sweat-stained money belt, and sent it by small boy up to Lu Pok. Like me, Bud had no doubt seen at the edge of the audience a group of rough characters wearing head-rags and carrying submachine guns and machetes. Whether they were revolutionary guerillas or mere bandits, the money was better lost through extortion than violence. It was surely a modest amount with which to build a modern laboratory, but then the costs of labor in that country were minuscule.
“Thank you again,” said Lu Pok. “Now all that remains is to remove from Poon’s name the possible shadow. He was an archaic thinker and his power over cobra was limited, but in its day it had been most effectual.”
The governor clapped his hands, and from the crowd tripped my little tan friend of the steam bath. Carrying a covered basket, she mounted the platform and stood shyly before Lu Pok.
“This then is our tribute to Poon,” said the governor. He signaled the drummers, and they applied fluttering fingers to their instruments, producing a soft rumble, a susurrus really, much like the sound of the wind through a grove of bamboo.
The girl took the cover from the basket. After a long moment the dark head of a cobra rose above the rim. With none of Dr. Poon’s preliminaries, the maiden extended her arm and the reptile struck it near the wrist. Lu Pok drew from his tunic a packet of the saffron powder and sprinkled the wound. The girl drank the contents of a vial of colorless liquid, sat down on the platform, and waited.
Alongside me, Bud in a low voice expressed a wish to inspect the linen-wrapped body atop the funeral pyre, but made no move towards it.
Five minutes passed, then ten. The girl’s smile never faltered. After a suspenseful quarter of an hour, Lu Pok took her hand and raised her. She curtsied, her face like a flower, displaying no damage to flesh or nerve.
“Bring fire!” ordered Lu Pok in a stentorian voice, in two languages, and from nowhere breech-clothed men appeared with blazing torches, ran to the pyre, hurled them thereon. In a trice the brush was enkindled and a great roaring rush of red flame, plumed by white smoke and black, obscured the little form atop the pyramid.
Whether it was indeed the lifeless remains of Dr. Poon that were here incinerated; whether he had simulated death, arising soon as we white men left the jungle hut and substituting for his own body a dummy, to be wrapped in burlap and carried back to the capital by Lu Pok; whether the situation was more sinister than it seemed—who can say?
Bud Servo immediately decamped from Asia altogether, abandoning the other projects. Back in New York, he took to a research laboratory samples of the cobra antidote which he had managed to filch from Poon’s hut in the solemn moments after the little doctor’s death. When analyzed the saffron-colored dust proved to be—saffron. The fluid, a neutral alcoholic spirit similar to vodka. Bud was also assured by leading authorities on reptiles and toxicology that neither of these substances could neutralize the venom of the king cobra, that furthermore even a genuine antidote would never be administered subcutaneously or through the gastrointestinal tract.
To Bud these reports were irrefutable evidence that he had been victim of an Oriental swindle, and perhaps no feeling is so poignant as that of the charlatan who believes he has himself been gulled.
For whatever it is worth—though, as elsewhere throughout my life thus far, in this affair I cannot be called a true principal—I might conclude by saying that I see Dr. Poon as certainly exotic, surely complex, and perhaps mad. But it is also quite possible that he was the only genuine hero we ever depicted on Courage.