Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/346

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1 6 Oil the Origm of I he Egyptian " Zar.''

Kaltuma, wife and cousin of Farag, is also haunted by liabinga and N'gurma ; she is about 35 years old. Some eleven years ago, long after her marriage with Farag, she became very ill, and one day to her surprise she found her finger nails stained with henna. She consulted a kojur, who told her that she must hold a zdr to Babinga and N'gurma ; she did so and a sheep was killed, and she drank the blood mixed with five kinds of scents. The third dancer, a man called Madigu, was also haunted by the same spirits. The zar which was performed for Kaltuma, who had been suffer- ing from a pain in her chest, began at 1 1 a.m. and was held in the open air. Under a low open shelter some half dozen women stood in a row singing and shaking tin rattles, called in Omdurman kashkask, while three men beat the big drums, called nugdra. All were dressed in their best, the women with bright coloured handkerchiefs bound round their heads and gay sashes about their bodies. The dance took place in the open space before the shelter ; to the left against a mud wall was a group of articles sacred to the A-Zande spirits. On a long staff waved a red flag, the throwing- knife of Babinga stitched upon it in white. Below were five pots of charcoal upon which different kinds of incense were smouldering, also a pot of simsim for Babinga, and a covered basket in which sweet potatoes, ground nuts, and maize were prepared for Rusea and Nunga as well as for their parents. One tripod supported a large pot of merissa for Babinga, another, a smaller one, for N'gurma, while a basket on a third tripod contained all sorts of odds and ends, the prized possessions of a Sudanese soldier, including a padlock, pencil, hammer, small gourd, onions, some red paint and the wood from which it is made, called m'baga, and other items ; later the liver of the sheep killed in the ceremony was added to this miscellaneous collection. Hang- ing from the tripods were a stringed instrument with gourd resonator, a Yambio knife, and a number of sheep's skulls and bones, and fowls' legs. These were the remains of the