There are certain roads and streets which remind me of my favourite writers and their works. For instance, walking down Sudder Street past Fairlawn Hotel in the city of Kolkata, I remember I Allan Sealy who stayed at the hotel called Tourist Inn for a few months, and finished writing his award-winning novel The Trotter-nama there.

 I remember Hugh Gantzer whenever I visit Camel Back’s Road in the town of Mussoorie. This stretch always strikes me as the place where his story about king cobras titled ‘The Hamadryads” is situated. I have always been curious about snakes, especially cobras. I can vividly recall the British author Paul Brunton’s experience, as narrated in his book A Search in Secret Egypt, with some ferocious snakes that lived in the ruins around the pyramids. 

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With the help of an Egyptian snake charmer, who coaxed a dangerous snake out of its hole, he actually risked his life and held it in his arms for a few seconds. When you enter Camel Back’s Road via Library Stand, you could see, on the immediate right steep hills. On closer inspection, some distance down the road, you find a narrow path and worn-out steps partly hidden by the daisies and irises going up a slope and disappearing into the thickets.

A little higher up, there are a group of rocks resembling camel’s humps on a knoll. The scene is so very similar to the description in Hugh’s story that glancing up from the road with the Doon valley on the left you tend to think a ‘vicious’ cobra is looking down on you unseen from that height! In the short story “The Hamadryads”, the action takes place on such a knoll in the Mussoorie mountains where lived a couple of hamadryads who did not like human presence in their territory. Whoever ventured to go there for whatever purpose never returned.

A Superintendent of Police and his wife, stung by the deaths of some people working under them by snakebites, decided to confront the king cobras, both of which were more than fifteen to eighteen feet long. In the end the couple came out as winners but what they had to go through is described in chilling detail, and the growing suspense makes the reader stop several times to take a long, deep breath. 

This story would put any reader on the edge of his seat. It’s chiefly this story that once drew me to Hugh and Colleen Gantzer’s Ockbrook Cottage in the Himalayas where I interviewed them. Hugh is a wonderful short story writer but is known primarily as a travel writer who teams up with his gifted wife, Colleen. They are both great animal lovers, and all of the stories of Hugh I read were about one animal or the other, and they are so gripping that I dip into them quite often. 

When it was time for me to leave after the interview, I handed Hugh the book that contained this story, and, on the flyleaf, he wrote: “You got us to open doors which we thought had been rusted shut many years ago.”