In this last variant we have death as the result of a failure or
transgression. Among the more backward natives of South India (Lewin's
Wild Races of South India) the serpent is concerned, in a suspicious way,
with the Origin of Death. The following legend might so easily arise
from a confused understanding of the Mohammedan or Biblical narrative
that it is of little value for our purpose. At the same time, even if it
is only an adaptation, it shows the characteristics of the adapting
mind:--God had made the world, trees, and reptiles, and then set to work
to make man out of clay. A serpent came and devoured the still inanimate
clay images while God slept. The serpent still comes and bites us all,
and the end is death. If God never slept, there would be no death. The
snake carries us off while God is asleep. But the oddest part of this
myth remains. Not being able always to keep awake, God made a dog to
drive away the snake by barking. And that is why dogs always howl when
men are at the point of death. Here we have our own rural superstition
about howling dogs twisted into a South Indian myth of the Origin of
Death. The introduction of Death by a pure accident recurs in a myth of
Central Africa reported by Mr. Duff Macdonald. There was a time when the
man blessed by Sancho Panza had not yet 'invented sleep.' A woman it was
who came and offered to instruct two men in the still novel art of
sleeping. 'She held the nostrils of one, and he never awoke at all,' and
since then the art of dying has been facile.