Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/504

 4/0 Some jVoccs on East Afj'ican Folklore.

persistently denied his guilt, when lodged there for the night (I suppose pending removal to Malindi for trial), became so terrified that he shrieked to be let out, and admitted every- thing. The story, as far as I could make it out, was that three askari of the police were seated on the verandah one evening after dark, when they saw a woman come from the direction of the graves (near the mnara already mentioned) and pass along the lane which runs at right angles to the front of the baraza. One of the three, a Mkamba named Hamisi (described as an unusually handsome, light- complexioned man, " more like an Arab than a Mkamba ") called out to her in a free and easy fashion — assuming, we may suppose, that no respectable person would be roaming the town at that hour — " Bibi, come here ! " She made no reply, and he went round the corner of the house and saw her standing on the steps of the birika. (Most of the better Swahili houses with a cistern on the ground-floor have an opening, reached by two or three steps, by which it can be filled from outside.) He went up to her, and called out " What are you standing there for ? " when she laid her finger on her lips and said " Uss ! " (the equivalent for "hush!"). He then seized her by the arm, and she turned and hit him on the cheek with her two fingers, made a sound which the narrator expressed by ''' akaiiisonyal' and disappeared. He went into the house, told his comrades what had happened and fell forward on his face unconscious. His face and his whole body swelled up ; he suffered frightful internal pains, and by the next day "his tongue was hanging out of his mouth down to his chest !" They carried him in a hammock to the Malindi hospital, where he died on the following da.y, the doctor having diagnosed his malady as ''' slictani\ "

As this was said to have happened " last year," in the month of Mfunguo wa Pili (z.e. in October or November, 191 1), when " Bwana Traill" was Balozi (District Com- missioner), there seemed some hope of ascertaining what