Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 4.djvu/534

MAPPILLA hundred, will engage in a fight with Kāfirs, and die in company with the Tangal. One of these men (who are known as Hālar), by name Avarumāyan, two months ago collected a number of his countrymen, and sacrificed a bull, and, for preparing meals for these men, placed a copper vessel with water on the hearth, and said that rice would appear of itself in the vessel. He waited for some time. There was no rice to be seen. Those who had assembled there eat beef alone, and dispersed. Some people made fun of Avarumāyan for this. He felt ashamed, and went to Taramal Tangal, with whom he stayed two or three days. He then went to the mosque at Mambram, and, on attempting to fly through the air into the mosque on the southern side of the river at Tirurangādi, fell down through the opening of the door, and became lame of one leg, in which state he is reported to be still lying. While the Hālar of Munniyūr dēsam were performing niskāram one day at the tomb of Chemban Pokar Mūppan, a rebel, they declared that in the course of a week a mosque would spring up at night, and that there would be complete darkness for two full days. Māppillas waited in anxious expectation of the phenomenon for seven or eight days and nights. There was, however, neither darkness nor mosque to be seen. Again, in the month of Karkigadam last, some of the influential Māppillas led their ignorant Hindu neighbours to believe that a ship would arrive with the necessary arms, provisions, and money for forty thousand men; and that, if that number could be secured meanwhile, they could conquer the country, and that the Hindus would then totally vanish. It appears that it was about this time that some Tiyyar (toddy-drawers) and others became converts. None of the predictions having been realised, Māppillas, as well as others, have begun to