Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/502

 468 Some jVo/es on East African Folklore.

a great distance, and, if you climbed the baobab which grows beside the pillar and looked into the vase from above, you could see Mecca ! (Considering the relative positions of the baobab and the pillar, one may be excused for doubting the possibilit}' of this feat ; but, I may add, it is obvious to the eye that some ornament has been broken off the top.) The vase was shot down by one of Seyyid Barghash's soldiers — a man from Hadramaut (" those Hadhramis, they neither fear God nor regard man!") But, as the fragments reached the ground, the soldier fell down dead. This is supposed to have happened about thirty years ago.

Sherif Aluwi, Seyyid Bakari's son, is a young man of perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three. He was a little boy when his father died, and the story goes that he kept asking for him, unable to understand what had happened, till he was told " Baba ivako aineknfa hoko vinaraiii — your father is lying dead over there by the inuara (pillar)." Still he could not understand what they meant by death, but went out to the pillar to search for his father, calling him again and again. That night Bakari appeared in a dream to one of his old friends and asked him to see that the boy was never allowed to go near th-e grave, " for if he calls me again I shall have to come out." So they frightened the child with stories of lions and snakes haunting the place, and kept him at home till he forgot.

Ngomeni, a small and not very prosperous village on the coast north of Mambrui, is the third place of the name : the ruins of an older town are hidden in thick bush on a headland a little to the south-east, and a still older one has been swallowed up by the sea — traces of what is said to be a mosque are visible at low water. The people say that in old times the inhabitants suffered so much from the incursions of the Masai (possibly the Galla are meant) that, though they beat them off for the time being, they felt they would be quite unable to resist another attack. Thus the