Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/427

 Rh and given none to them. One day their father saw them busy making long hooks (ngami) to pull out grubs (kuyikinka) from their holes in the gum trees. They told him they knew of a tree full of kuyikinkas, and the old Mura-mura climbed up to get some. As he climbed his sons kept urging him to go on higher, and all the time the tree raised itself or grew up further from the ground by reason of their magic. Then they set it on fire, and, as the burning tree rose up carrying Nganto-warrina, the sons saw that their father was being roasted, and one of them threw up a skin by his boomerang so that the old man might shelter himself from the heat.

Nganto-warrina still hangs in the sky as the moon, and the Dieri say the dark mark on its face is the place where the old Mura-mura covered himself with the skin.

Ngami are like long slender crochet-hooks made of wood, with which the blacks skilfully extract the grubs from their tunnel-like holes in the gum tree trunks.

Nardoo forms a staple article of food with these tribes, and has been well known to the whites since the unfortunate explorers Burke and Wills tried unsuccessfully to live on it, when Wills wrote in his diary that it was "not unpleasant starvation." Some of the seed actually collected by them, and afterwards found by Mr. A. W. Howitt's rescue party, is before me now. The so-called seeds are spore-cases of a species of Marsilia, a genus common to many parts of Australia. The "seeds" are oblong and flattened in shape, about an eighth of an inch in width and a quarter long, and chocolate-brown in colour.

Two Mura-muras, who were husband and wife, once remarked that both had feathers on their bodies and that more were growing. They began to dance, and, as they did so, they went by accident into the fire, so that their legs were shrivelled up. The other Mura-muras noticed this, and said: "Go out from among us; you do not belong to us; you are Warukatti." And they drove them away to run about as emus.