Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/507

 Some jVo/cs on East African Folklore. 473

being told that it was already full, said, "Shindilia mai-twaa mti liuu ukashindilie — Take this pestle and press it down !" The man did so with such hearty goodwill that he soon cracked the bottom of the jar, and the master, seeing the level of the water sinking, cried " Now pour in some more ! "

Stories of a religious character are popular with pious Moslems. I do not know whether the following, which was told me by Bwana Ahmadi Bakari, of Mambrui, is current elsewhere, but he may have read it in an Arabic book — he possessed a collection of some twenty or thirty. A poor man who had been keeping the Ashura fast (the tenth day of Muharram) with great devotion (though apparently he could not have broken it had he so desired) went out in the evening to try and get some food for his children, and asked the loan of a dirhem from a rich money-lender, who took no notice of his request. He then fell in with a com- passionate Jew, who, hearing his story, made him take ten dirhems as a gift. The rich man dreamed that night that the day of resurrection had come, and he found himself tormented by thirst in front of a beautiful house, where he asked for water. The people in the house refused it saying, " Yesterday this house was yours, but when a poor man came asking you for a dirhem, you would not give it him ; and he went to a Jew, who gave him ten. So now your name has been erased from this house, and it belongs to the Jew." In the morning, the money-lender went to the Jew and offered him a hundred dinars for the ten which the Jew had given to the poor man {i.e. he wanted the Jew to make over the merit of the act to him). The Jew refused this and higher offers, and asked how the transaction, which had taken place in private, had become known to him. " He who told it me is Almighty God." The Jew repeated the Kalima (" There is no God but God, etc."), which, I suppose, was equivalent to declaring himself a Moslem, and the rich man went away dejected, and the story ends

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