The Assistance which the Snake gave
Reading edition
In a certain country the King’s elephant every day having descended into a pool, bathes. In the water a Water Snake (Diya nayā) stayed.
One day a beggar went to the pool to bathe. As soon as he came the Snake came to bite him. When it came, the man having beseeched it and made obeisance, said, “Anē! O Lord, for me to bathe you must either go to the bottom or come ashore.”
This was all done as the Snake said. The beggar tapped on the tusk elephant’s forehead, and said, “Anē! O Lord, you must descend into the water-pot; if not, to-day I shall cut my throat.” Then the Snake came down the tusk elephant’s trunk into the water-pot, as he had promised.
The beggar then took the tusk elephant to the King; it was no longer mad. The King rode on it along the four streets, and came back to the palace, and descended.
Then he asked the beggar, “How didst thou cure this sickness?”
The beggar said, “I caused a Water Snake to come down the tusk elephant’s trunk into the water-pot, and thus cured him.”
Then the King went with the beggar to look at the Snake. When he saw it in the water-pot he ascertained that the man’s statement was true. After that he gave offices to the beggar.
Tom-tom Beater. North-western Province.
Dr. J. Pearson, Director of the Colombo Museum, has been good enough to inform me that the water-snake termed diya nayā in Sinhalese (lit., Water Cobra) is Tropidonotus asperrimus. Though neither large nor venomous, snakes of this species sometimes attacked my men when they were bathing at a pool in a river, or endeavoured to carry off fishes which they had placed in the water after stringing them through the gills on a creeper. They did this even when the man held the other end of the creeper.