To make myself assured that the animal was in its perfect state, I made the man hold him by the neck so as to force him to open his mouth, and lacerate the thigh of a pelican, a bird I had tamed, as big as a swan. The bird died in about 13 minutes, though it was apparently affected in 50 seconds; and we cannot think this was a fair trial, because a very few minutes before, it had bit the man, and so discharged part of its virus, and it was made to scratch the pelican by force, without any irritation or action of its own. The Cerastes inhabits the greatest part of the eastern continent, especially the desert sandy parts of it. It abounds in Syria, in the three Arabias, and in Africa. I never saw so many of them as in the Cyrenaicum, where the Jerboa is frequent in proportion. He is a great lover of heat; for tho’ the sun was burning hot all day, when we made a fire at night, by digging a hole, and burning wood to charcoal in it, for dressing our victuals, it was seldom we had fewer than half a dozen of these vipers, who burnt themselves to death approaching the embers. I apprehend this to be the aspic which Cleopatra employed to procure her death. Alexandria, plentifully supplied by water, must then have had fruit of all kinds in its gardens. The baskets of figs must have come from thence, and the aspic, or Cerastes, that was hid in them, from the adjoining desert, where there are plenty to this day; for to the westward in Egypt, where the Nile overflows, there is no sort of serpent whatever that I ever saw; nor, as I have before said, is there any other of the mortal kind that I know in those parts of Africa adjoining to Egypt, excepting the Cerastes. It should seem very natural for any one, who, from motives of distress, has resolved to put a period to his existence, especially women and weak persons unaccustomed to handle arms, to seek the gentlest method to free themselves from that load of life now become insupportable. This, however, has not always been the case with the ancients. Aria, Petus’s wife, stabbed herself with a dagger, to set her husband an example to die, with this memorable assurance, after giving herself the blow, “Petus, it is not painful.” Porcia, the wife of Brutus, died by the barbarous, and not obvious way of perishing, by swallowing fire; the violent agitation of spirits prevailing over the momentary difference in the suffering. It is not to be doubted but that a woman, high-spirited like Cleopatra, was also above the momentary differences in feeling; and had the way in which she died not been ordinary and usual, she certainly would not have applied herself to the invention of a new one. We are therefore to look upon her dying by the bite of the Cerastes, as only following the manner of death which she had seen commonly adopted by those who were intended to die without torment.