Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/271

 Balochi Folklore. 255

ballads reach us from a Rind source, it is always admitted that the Rinds acted dishonestly on this occasion. The Lasharis went off in wrath, and some hot-headed young men, coming across Gohar's herd of female camels with their young ones, killed some of the young camels. As they came back in the evening, the female camels in their distress stirring up the dust, the milk dripping from their udders, Chakar also arrived at Gohar's tents. He asked what had happened, and Gohar tried to put him off, saying that the young camels had died from eating poison bushes ; but he quickly got the truth out of the herdsman, and swore an oath to take revensfe on the Lashari, to " oramble with hair and heads and turbans." So the war began, and lasted for thirty years, till the " teeth dropped from their heads." The Rinds had ultimately the worst of it, and Chakar led them to the Panjab, where other tribes had already gone before. Another set of ballads deals with the wars which took place there, and their attack on Delhi with Humayun. There is a certain amount of real history mixed up with all this. Chakar was a real leader of the Baloches, and was living in Humayun's time, but history does not tell us whether the Baloches took part in his expedition to recover his kingdom. If they did, it is evident that their share in it was not quite so important as their poems represent it. Chakar figures in the ballads as a man of wonderful powers : we are told how he fought with an elephant, having no weapon except a dog which was lying asleep in the road; and other surprising adventures. He looked back on Sibi from a hill still called Chakar-Mari, although Sibi is not really visible from it ; he was fleeing through the Chakar- tankh, or Chakar' s defile, with a herd of buffaloes, which were turned into stones to obstruct his enemies. They are still to be seen in the form of boulders scattered about the pass.

There is perhaps a mythological element in some of the stories, which may go back to pre-Muhammadan times.