Note 28 — Chapter IX · AMONG THE YAOS

This crowing serpent is well known by hearsay throughout Nyasaland. It is said to have a red crest and to have “killed very many people in the Angoni country” (Scott’s Dictionary, s.v., Kasongo). The natives who told me about it had never seen it themselves, but had heard about it from hunters; they described its habit of darting down from trees, and added that the said hunters circumvented it by making the foremost man of the party carry a pot full of fire (others say very hot gruel or scalding bran-mash) on his head, into which the snake descends and perishes. The Anyanja say ingolira koh—“It cries koh!” (they render the sound of a cock’s crow as kokololiko). Mr. Richard Crawshay assured me that the songo was a real and not a mythical snake; he had killed one—but it had no red crest, and he had not heard its voice. The late Bishop Maples, however, did, on one occasion, hear a “large snake with a serrated comb” crow like a cock while travelling between Masasi and the Rovuma in 1877.—[Tr.]