Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/91

 Rh cause is a Jin throwing a batu lintar at his enemy. Another is a big animal, such as an elephant or a bison, shaking himself in the jungle."

Mr. Scrivener gives the main points of the belief as they were told to himself, and the essential facts are that batu lintar dive found in the ground and that they gradually get harder or riper. When they are hard or ripe they rise out of the ground and burst with a loud report, and when they strike a tree they first strike a trunk and then the branches. They are powerful magic till they are chipped, when they lose their power. "Lightning comes out of a herd of big game, such as a herd of elephants." Upon this I may remark that, though I cannot give any specific example as to the belief that the thunderbolt strikes upwards, rising up out of the ground and first reaching the stem and then the branches, the idea is certainly neither unfamiliar to me in the character of a Malay belief, nor is it in any way surprising, the only point of which I am in any doubt being as to whether these bolts do not rise after they have fallen as in the German belief that they rise nine days later, mentioned by Sir J. Evans. For the internal evidence of Mansur's own account shows that in some cases at least the Jins must cast them down, or they could not hit human beings. An exactly similar belief is held by the Malays with regard to other shaped things found in the earth,—with regard to treasure jars, for instance, of which I will presently give an example; and I may add that the Malay belief as to other such objects is certainly that they sink into and rise up out of the ground, and this idea, so far from being rare, is quite common,—I may in fact say, without the least exaggeration, that no wellconducted Malay "treasure-jar" or crock or anything of that kind ever does anything else. Moreover, the parallel is exact, as regards the chipping of the vessel's lip, which is done because the Malays believe that the semangat or soul