Captain d'Horbourg consigned the captain of dromedaries to the infernal regions every five minutes. Suddenly he stopped short, his eyes fixed and his gun arrested in his hand. "General!" he cried to my father, who was about twenty-five paces from him. "Well, what's the matter?" "A snake!" "What! a snake?" "Yes, and such a size! It is thicker than my arm." "Where is it?" "In front of me!" My father took a few steps forward, but although he looked most attentively, he could not see anything. He shrugged his shoulders to indicate his inability. "Why, there, there! Can't you see it?" said the captain. "It is curled round and round, sitting up on its coils with its head poised, hissing." "Well, then, fire at it as quickly as you can, or it will spring." Captain d'Horbourg rapidly raised his gun to his shoulder and drew the trigger. Only the priming went off. At the same moment the snake sprang, but before it had covered the distance that separated it from the captain, the gun went off, and the ball shattered its head. The serpent fell at the captain's feet and coiled round his legs in its death convulsions, writhing in its agony. The captain shrieked, for he did not see for the moment the state the snake was in. When he had recovered himself and was somewhat reassured, Captain d'Horbourg took the snake to Cairo, skinned it and had the skin made into a sword-belt as a souvenir of his narrow escape. But the whole way back he kept reiterating to my father-- "Ah! General--didn't I tell you that devil of a rider would bring us ill luck!" As a matter of fact the two hunters shot nothing but the snake, and it could not be described as a good bag. In the month of July 1843, on my return from Florence, I lodged at the hotel de _Paris_, in the rue de Richelieu, where I received a letter signed "Ludovic d'Horbourg," wherein the writer begged an interview with me to unburden his mind of a dying request made him by his father. The next day was to be the first representation of _Les Demoiselles de Saint-Cyr_, so I put off the interview till the day after. General Dumas's old Egyptian aide-de-camp had, on his deathbed, as a sign of his gratitude, ordered his son Ludovic d'Horbourg to give me after his death the skin of the serpent my father had killed so quickly and cleverly on the isle of Rhodes. It seems he had often related this adventure with the Nile serpent to his son, for, amidst the innumerable dangers Count d'Horbourg had encountered throughout his long military career, this one had remained the most deeply imprinted on his memory. Thanks to this verbal account, I am able to give the story here in all its details. My father had hardly rejoined his regiment before an occasion for displaying his skill as a pupil of Laboissière presented itself.