Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/279

 Balochi Folklore. 263

everywhere by thrusting his staff into the ground. Ul- timately his head was cut off by his enerwies, but he took it in his hands and pursued them until they made restitution, when he finally died. Offerings of goats are still made at his shrine.^ In the wildest part of the country of the Bozdar tribe I once came across a small shrine to a local saint. Around the tomb a number of large fossil shells had been placed, which were held sacred. I was in favour with the Bozdars just then, as I had succeeded in settling some old feuds among them, and the Chief of the tribe, who was with me, solemnly presented me with two of these shells, which I still have.

These Bozdars are among the wildest and least sophisti- cated of all the Baloch tribes. The ordeal by fire still prevails among them, and the Chief once reported a case to me officially, asking for sanction to the proceedings. A man had been accused of theft, and offered to clear himself by the fire-ordeal. A trench was filled with burning char- coal, and he had to walk along it from end to end. He did this, but his feet were burnt, and his accusers said that this proved his guilt ; but the Chief and all the head men of the tribe held that this was immaterial, and that the real test was to walk from end to end without climbing out of the trench on either side. As there was no evidence w^hatever against the man, I concurred.

An allusion to the ordeal by fire will be found in the story of Naina Bai.'-^ The test was somewhat different from that in the Bozdar case. Naina Bai had to clear herself of an accusation of being false to the king, her lover. She, too, had to walk from end to end of a trench filled with live charcoalj but as she really had been false it was necessary to circumvent the ordeal. Her actual lover accordingly dis- guised himself as a half-witted faqir, and just as she was

' See the whole story in Hetil Ram's Biluchi Naina (Douie's translation, Calcutta, 1885), p. 77. - Folk-Lore, iv. 290.