Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/466

424 about 16½ inches high, with an internal diameter of 8¼ inches. It is perforated with a number of holes to allow the wearer to breathe, and the dressing of the hair is carved in high relief. Holes near the lower rim of the mask serve for the attachment of a long robe of shaggy, black-dyed palm fibre. One of the principal officers of the Porro society is the tasso or ba-kasey (lawyer), who wears attached to his knees rattles of one of the forms shown in Figs. 11 and 12. The rattle in Fig. 11 is a bent plate of native iron containing a loose iron lump, while in Fig. 12 it is a longer and narrower bent plate (which may originally have contained a loose lump), with two loose jingling rings suspended at each end (Plate X.).

The Bundu or Bondo society is the initiation society for girls, and the normeh, or Bundu "devil," who avenges all interference with Bundu laws and taboos, and leads the girls at galas, etc., wears the mask shown in Fig. 2 (PI. VIII.). This mask is not perforated, and it is therefore necessary from time to time for the normeh to take it off, which is done under the shelter of a large mat unrolled round the "devil" by an attendant. The mask has been carved from a solid block of cotton-wood and blackened, and the carved hair-dressing is of a pattern greatly favoured by the native women. The dress worn with this mask is of rough black palm fibre, sewn up at the ends of the arms and legs so that no part of the body can be seen, and the dress in my possession has a number of jingling seeds attached to the waist. This "devil," although the women's devil and personated by a woman, never speaks, but conveys her orders by signs. The Bundu girls, during their training in dancing, deportment, medicine, and so on, by the mesu or "mother of the maids," are painted all over with wojeh, a mixture of white clay and animal fat which is credited with magical and protective properties, and the wojeh is used from the palette shown in Fig. 3. The palette ends in a head, on the neck of which are two horns having a fetish meaning. Similar horns appear on the neck of a minsereh figure (see below) in my possession which is not illustrated. Wojeh is also used to trace devices by the finger on the foreheads of the country belles.