Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/539

Rh those they have killed in a fight. This is not a common custom, but it is sometimes done. Over twenty-five years ago I knew a chief near San Salvador of whom it was generally reported that he had eaten the liver of a Portuguese soldier he had killed in battle when the Portuguese fought on behalf of Dom Pedro V. and reinstated him as King of San Salvador some twenty years previously.

Fire came first from above by lightning striking a tree and setting it on fire. People will not now go near a tree that has been struck by lightning, and, if the tree is near the road, everyone who passes it will tie a single bow in the grass every time they pass along that road. A mother will put the grass into the hand of her child while she ties the bow. This is to avert some indefinable evil that will fall on them should they omit the observance of this rite. When palm-trees and "nsafu" trees are struck by lightning, no one will again eat their fruits, and the same applies to any fruit-tree. A person killed by lightning is buried at the cross roads, as he (or she) is supposed to have been slain by the fetish "Nzaji," who controls the lightning. All those who are killed by "Nzaji" are treated in this way, e.g. a man who bleeds from the mouth and nose is said to be killed by "Nzaji," and his corpse is put into a grave dug by the road-side, and two stakes are driven into him,—one through the chest and the other through the stomach,—and the body is left uncovered. The diseases, and death by lightning, inflicted by "Nzaji" are especially for stealing, but not solely for this crime; and a person who dies by lightning or by a "Nzaji" sickness is regarded as a very bad person, and may not be buried with respectable folk. It may be that the tree struck by lightning is supposed to have done something worthy of the "Nzajis punishment, and hence those who can avoid the tree, and those who have to