The Grootslang: The Gods' First Mistake, Coiled on Diamonds
The legend begins with a sentence that no other mythology on earth has dared quite this baldly: the gods, when they were young, made mistakes. In the deep time of the world, say the traditions of South Africa's Northern Cape — where Khoikhoi and San memory mingled with the tales of the Boer frontier — the powers that shaped the animals were still learning their craft; and in their inexperience they made, early, a creature with too much of everything. They gave it the bulk and might and memory of the greatest land-thing they would ever design, and in the same body the cunning, the cold patience, and the endless coil of the subtlest. The result was the Grootslang — Afrikaans for "great snake," though the name undersells the horror — a serpent vast as a river with the head and forequarters of an elephant, or an elephant flowing away into forty feet of python: strength that nothing could oppose, wedded to guile that nothing could outwit. The young gods looked at what they h...