Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/463

Rh and Chhura Benglam. Dapa is credited with having begged the cold season from his father-in-law, Pathian. The following story is again from Colonel Lewin, (op. cit., p. 90). It was told him by a member of the Kumi clan, which lives in the Chittagong Hill tracts to the south of the Lushai Hills:—

"God made the world and the trees and the creeping things first, and after that he set to work to make one man and one woman, forming their bodies of clay; but each night, on the completion of his work, there came a great snake, which, while God was sleeping, devoured the two images. This happened twice or thrice, and God was at his wit's end, for he had to work all day, and could not finish the pair in less than 12 hours; besides, if he did not sleep, he would be no good. If he were not obliged to sleep, there would be no death, nor would mankind be afflicted with illness. It is when he rests that the snake carries us off to this day. Well, he was at his wit's end, so at last he got up early one morning and first made a dog and put life into it, and that night, when he had finished the images, he set the dog to watch them, and when the snake came, the dog barked and frightened it away. This is the reason at this day that when a man is dying the dogs begin to howl; but I suppose God sleeps heavily now-a-days, or the snake is bolder, for men die all the same." Colonel Lewin adds that he is unable to say whether this story is peculiar to the Kumis or derived from some other source. I see no reason to doubt that it is an original Kumi tale. Images of men and animals are offered to the demons of the forest and the rivers by every tribe in the Hills. May this not be a survival of a general belief that all animals and men were made as the Kumi described to Colonel Lewin?

The snake appears in several legends. The following is known through a wide area:—

"Once upon a time there was a girl called