Among the Hesperian Ethiopians, there is a fountain named Nigris, the head (as many have thought) of the river Nile, and good reasons there be to carry it, which we have alleged before. Near to which spring, there keeps a wild beast called Catoblepes, little of body otherwise, heavy also and slow in all his limbs besides, but his head only is so great that his body is hardly able to bear it; he always carries it down toward the earth, for if he did not so, he were able to kill all mankind. For there is not one that looks upon his eyes, but he dies presently. The like property has the serpent called a basilisk. Bred it is in the province Cyrenaica, and is not above twelve fingers-breadth long. A white spot like a star it carries on the head, and sets it out like a coronet or diadem. If he but hiss once, no other serpents dare come near. He creeps not, winding and crawling by as other serpents do, with one part of the body driving the other forward, but goes upright and aloft from the ground with the one half part of his body. He kills all trees and shrubs not only that he touches, but that he doth breath upon also. As for grass and herbs, those he singes and burns up, yea and breaks stones in sunder, so venomous and deadly is he. It is received for a truth, that one of them upon a time was killed with a lance by a horseman from his horseback, but the poison was so strong that went from his body along the staff, as it killed both horse and man. And yet a silly weasel has a deadly power to kill this monstrous serpent, as pernicious as it is (for many kings have been desirous to see the experience thereof, and the manner how he is killed). See how Nature has delighted to match everything in the world with a concurrent. The manner is, to cast these weasels into their holes and crannies where they lie, (and easy they be to know, by the stinking scent of the place all about them.) They are not so soon within, but they [the weasels] overcome them [the basilisks] with their strong smell, but they die themselves withall; and so Nature for her pleasure hath the combat dispatched.

Libya is the parent of a great number and a great variety of wild animals, and moreover it seems that the same country produces the animal called the Katoblepon (down-looking). In appearance, it is about the size of a bull, but it has a more grim expression, for its eyebrows are high and shaggy, and the eyes beneath are not large like those of oxen but narrower and bloodshot. And they do not look straight ahead but down on to the ground. That is why it is called “down-looking.” And a mane that begins on the crown of its head and resembles horse-hair falls over its forehead covering its face, which makes it more terrifying when one meets it. And it feeds upon poisonous roots. When it glares like a bull it immediately shudders and raises its mane, and when this has risen erect and the lips about its mouth are bared, it emits from its throat pungent and foul-smelling breath, so that the whole air overhead is infected, and any animals that approach and inhale it are grievously afflicted, lose their voice, and are seized with fatal convulsions. This beast is conscious of its power; and other animals know it too and flee from it as far away as they can.

So passed he [Amphilalus] over into the island, taking with him the two brothers of Anaxius, where he found the forsaken knight attired in his own livery, as black as sorrow itself could see itself in the blackest glass, his ornaments of the same hue, but formed into the figures of ravens, which seemed to gape for carrion. Only his reins were snakes, which finely wrapping themselves one within the other, their heads came together to the cheeks and bosses of the bit, where they might seem to bite at the horse, and the horse, as he champed the bit, to bite at them, and that the white foam was engendered by the poisonous fury of the combat. His impresa [heraldic badge] was a Catoblepta, which so long lies dead as the moon (whereto it hath so natural a sympathy) wants her light. The word signified that the moon wanted not the light, but the poor beast wanted the moon’s light. He had in his headpiece a whip, to witness a self-punishing repentance. Their very horses were coal-black too, not having so much as one star to give light to their night of blackness. So as one would have thought they had been the two sons of sorrow, and were come thither to fight for their birthright in that sorry inheritance.

And this magnale [marvel] of the (as it were) reanimation of the vindictive blood in the veins of a dead body, by the magic of those hostile and fermenting aporrhaeas [fumes], transmitted from the body of him who violently extinguished its former life, ushers in another, no less prodigious, nor less celebrated by naturalists: and that is the sudden dis-animation of the blood in living bodies, by the mere presence of the basilisk, catablepa, and diginus, serpents of a nature so transcendently venomous, that, according to popular tradition, and the several relations of Dioscorides, Galen, Pliny, Solinus, Aelian, Avicenna [all ancient authors], and most other authors who have treated of the proprieties of animals and venoms, they are destructive beyond themselves, i.e. they either kill by intuition, or hiss out the flames of life by their deleterious expirations. If natural historians have herein escaped that itch of fiction, to which they are so generally subject when they come to handle rarities, and that nature hath produced any such species, whose optical emissions, or pectoral expirations are fatal and pernicious to all, or most other living creatures, neither of which seems to be above controversy, the cause of this stupendous effect must consist only in this: that those rays which are emitted from the eyes, or that halitus [exhalation] expired from the lungs (for their hissing is far more loud and vehement than that of any others) of these serpents are deleterious in the superlative degree, i.e., of such subtlety and vehemence, that they both no sooner invade an animal, but they as it were in a moment alter and subvert the requisite temper of that spiritual substance wherein its life doth proximely [proximately] and principally depend, and so render it thenceforth wholly unfit to perform the actions of life. But as for those other traditions, 1) of the basilisks destroying a man by prior aspect alone; 2) of its identity with the cockatrice, which hath no real existence in nature, and is only an hieroglyphical fiction, or symbolical invention of the old Egyptians; 3) of its production from the egg of an old decrepit cock; and 4) of its being an animal with wings, legs, a long and spiral tail, and a crest or comb on the head, like that of a cock, as it is vulgarly described and painted, and represented in those artificial contrivances made of the skin of a thornback [ray or skate fish] by imposters: we may justly refer them partly to absolute impossibilities, partly to vain and ridiculous follies, as the industrious Aldrovandi [a sixteenth-century Italian naturalist], and ingenious Doctor Brown [Sir Thomas Browne] have done before us.

There is also noted and marked to be a kind of antipathetical aspect, between the creatures here below, as well as between some special stars, both erratic and fixed, above; and also one creature’s beamy aspect is known to abhor the other, so that in their applications of beams, the one is observed to eschew and decline or reflex from the other, with a kind of irascible, formidable or odible [horrible] and hateful aversion. Mizaldus [Antonio Mizauld, a sixteenth-century French physician and astronomer] tells us that the cucumber being as it were terrified at the noise of the thunder, is often changed. The onion was refused by the Egyptians to be eaten because it was noted by them to vary from all other growing things, for as all herbs, saving it, did increase as the moon did, so, only the onion did contrariwise, receive all his detriment and diminution, when that star did increase in his light. There is an antipathy between the lightning and the fig-tree and the hide of the sea-calf, and therefore these are never struck by it. Also, there is known to be exceeding hatred between the reed and the fern or brake, insomuch that if either of the roots bruised be laid on the stalks or branches of the other, it casts it off from it with a scornful hatred. Of all beasts also the elephant hates and detests the little mouse, so that if any of the food which is administered unto them, be eaten or touched by mice, they will abhor and loath it forthwith. The like antipathy is noted to be between the natures of the catablepa and the weasel: for the weasels are as poison unto them. The cock doth antipathetically abhor the fox. All snakes and adders do fear and fly from the ashen-tree, insomuch that they are careful to keep themselves as well out of the forenoon as afternoon shadow of it. Again, Diascorides [a first century Greek botanist] reports that the taxus or yew-tree is so venomous, that if any one do but sit under it he is hurt thereby, and often times it costs him his life. And Caelius Rhodiginus [an early sixteenth-century Venetian writer] says that the adder is afraid of a naked man. It is well known and confirmed by many authors that the catablepa being but a very small animal, kills with the beam of his aspect a thousand paces off from him. Also, one blear-eyed person is able to infect another afar off by the secret emission of his contagious beams.

To the wizards, a beast with the body of a buffalo, a huge tail and neck, the head of a warthog, and a gaze that slew was clearly a magical beast, and they bitterly rejected the jibe of the naturalists that such a beast, magical or not, would strangle on its own contradictions. The beasts had been seen, said the wizards, which proved that they existed, but any observer rash enough to meet the gaze of a catoblepas died instantly—and what more proof did one need of the beast’s magical origin?

[One night at the Alchemists’ Guild Hall, Bel-Ami presents a male catoblepas to the crowd and explains what he has learned about these creatures.] The female is a large omnivore, feeding mostly on ooze and water plants dredged from the swamps it lives in, but gaining an important part of its diet from animals it has killed. And no, she doesn’t kill them with her deadly gaze, but with her breath!

The female catoblepas secretes a gas, deadly to anything except the female catoblepas, that is belched out in an invisible cloud. The effective range is only about sixty feet before it disperses, but within that range, the only chance of escape is to run faster than the cloud expands. The gas is equally deadly if breathed in or absorbed through the skin. It was obvious from the time that I started to form this hypothesis that the ‘cat’ was immune to its own poison, but it was not for a long time afterward that I connected the female catoblepas with the small herds of grazers that were always found in the same area, following at a discreet distance, and realized that they were two forms of the same species!

The male, poor fellow, is not immune to the poison cloud, and normally keeps well clear of the female. But in the mating season, the female exudes a scent which drives the male wild with a lust that frequently overpowers his instinct for self-preservation. He must try to wait until a solitary female is feeding with her head buried in the ooze of the swamp. Then, sprinting up to her, he dodges the heavy tail normally used as a defense, mates very quickly, and sprints off again.

Six months later, the small, deer-like young are born. Since they are exposed to mild doses of the toxin before birth, they are immune to it. They are all weaned together, but at the end of the first year something very strange happens. The young scatter, and differentiate into sexes–a minority of females which remain immune to the toxin that they have begun to secrete, becoming fatter and thicker and eating flesh as well as plants; and the males, which undergo a radical change in their body chemistry, losing their immunity to the toxin and becoming fast-moving herbivores. As yet I can only speculate on the reasons for this division of the species; it may ensure a fitter breeding stock, or allow better use of existing food resources than the more conventional way, or both, or neither.