Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/412

 392 Cairene Folklore.

weruzz " (Pshaw, Abu-Faris ; so you want to eat sheep and rice !).

The 'afdrit or afrits usually appear only at night, but in some instances they show themselves during the day. Thus, in the cliff a little to the south of Tehna, a Coptic village of Upper Egypt, on the east bank of the Nile to the north of Minia, there is a large cave over which is an in- scription in Greek letters. The inscription is dated in the reign of Ptolemy Epiphanes, and we gather from it that the cave was consecrated to Isis Mokhias. Once when I was visiting the place, the son of the omda or head-man of the village, who happened to be with me, told me that the cave was inhabited by a very dangerous afrit. If a solitary traveller or a bad man passed it during the day, the afrit would come out of the cavern and kill him. At night, no one ventured to pass the spot, as the afrit would then kill all the passers-by, even if they were good men and were walking in company.

I heard from an engineer at Damanhur, in the Delta, that whenever he sat down to eat a white cat appeared ; he used to give it food, and then it disappeared again. One night, when he was travelling in the dark, he was attacked by robbers, and would have been robbed, and perhaps mur- dered, had not the white cat suddenly appeared and " struck " them so that he was able to escape. Then he knew that it was an afrit, and was careful ever afterwards to give it food when it appeared to him at his meals. In this case the afrtt assumes the form of a protecting genius rather than of a harmful demon, and it is worth noting that there is a widespread belief among the Egyptians that the souls of twins when they die pass into the bodies of cats.

For the curious superstitions connected with snakes, and the modern survival of the ancient serpent-worship, I must refer to my article on " Serpent-worship in Ancient and Modern Egypt" in the Contemporary Review for October, 1893. Here I have described the worship still paid to the