I explained to Strickland, gently as might be, that I would go over to the Club and find for myself quarters there.  I admired his hospitality, was pleased with his guns and rods, but I did not much care for his house and its atmosphere.  He heard me out to the end, and then smiled very wearily, but without contempt, for he is a man who understands things.  ‘Stay on,’ he said, ’and see what this thing means.  All you have talked about I have known since I took the bungalow.  Stay on and wait.  Tietjens has left me.  Are you going too?’

I had seen him through one little affair, connected with a heathen idol, that had brought me to the doors of a lunatic asylum, and I had no desire to help him through further experiences.  He was a man to whom unpleasantnesses arrived as do dinners to ordinary people.

Therefore I explained more clearly than ever that I liked him immensely, and would be happy to see him in the daytime; but that I did not care to sleep under his roof.  This was after dinner, when Tietjens had gone out to lie in the verandah.

‘’Pon my soul, I don’t wonder,’ said Strickland, with his eyes on the ceiling-cloth.  ‘Look at that!’

The tails of two brown snakes were hanging between the cloth and the cornice of the wall.  They threw long shadows in the lamplight.

‘If you are afraid of snakes of course—­’ said Strickland.

I hate and fear snakes, because if you look into the eyes of any snake you will see that it knows all and more of the mystery of man’s fall, and that it feels all the contempt that the Devil felt when Adam was evicted from Eden.  Besides which its bite is generally fatal, and it twists up trouser legs.

‘You ought to get your thatch overhauled,’ I said.

’Give me a mahseer-rod, and we’ll poke ’em down.’

‘They’ll hide among the roof-beams,’ said Strickland.  ’I can’t stand snakes overhead.  I’m going up into the roof.  If I shake ’em down, stand by with a cleaning-rod and break their backs.’

I was not anxious to assist Strickland in his work, but I took the cleaning-rod and waited in the dining-room, while Strickland brought a gardener’s ladder from the verandah, and set it against the side of the room.

The snake-tails drew themselves up and disappeared.  We could hear the dry rushing scuttle of long bodies running over the baggy ceiling-cloth.  Strickland took a lamp with him, while I tried to make clear to him the danger of hunting roof-snakes between a ceiling-cloth and a thatch, apart from the deterioration of property caused by ripping out ceiling-cloths.

‘Nonsense!’ said Strickland.  ’They’re sure to hide near the walls by the cloth.  The bricks are too cold for ’em, and the heat of the room is just what they like.’  He put his hand to the corner of the stuff and ripped it from the cornice.  It gave with a great sound of tearing, and Strickland put his head through the opening into the dark of the angle of the roof-beams.  I set my teeth and lifted the rod, for I had not the least knowledge of what might descend.