Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/127

 of Sociology and Folklore. 1 1 /

and goods in times of danger.^ The Baloch will find a place to lay his head in any cavity in the hillside.^ Valen- tine Ball found a group of troglodytes in Central India and in the hills below Simla, and he remarks that it is extraordinary how little such people do to protect them- selves from the inclemency of the weather : in one case their only protection from the keen hill air was a lean-to of loosely twined branches, such as Palaeohthic man may have used.^ In Burma groups of ascetics still occupy caves on the cliffs of the Irawadi, and Mr. Nesfield suggests that the Musahars of Bengal, perhaps as a survival of cave life, prefer a hut into which they can barely creep.*

The most usual, if not the most ancient, form of the European hut was circular, and Schrader suggests that it was an imitation of the felt-covered, circular tent of the nomad. ^ The Ilyat hut in Persia consists of a wooden frame of laths in a circular form covered with large felts which are fastened with a cord.^ The process of converting this into a hut is shown in that of the Turkom.ans, where oblong walls about four feet in height are built up of loose stones, and the whole is covered with a black cloth of goats' hair elevated on one or more posts about eight feet high in the middle of the enclosure.' The Indian examples seem to indicate that the circular form of the hut was ultimately derived from the habit of bending down, in a circular shape, the branches of some flexible tree like the bamboo. Mr. V. A. Smith has shown that the conical

^ Sir T. H. Holdich, The Indian Border-laud, 56.

"^Census Report, Baluchistan, 1911, i. 27.

'^Jungle Life in India, 588 et seq.

••Shway Voe, The Burfnan, i. 169; Calcutta Kevieiu, Ixxxvi. 36 ; see below the account of the Juangand Oraon huts.

» Op. cit. 345.

^J. J. Morier, Second Journey throtigh Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor, 251, with illustrations.

"J. L. lUirckhardt, Travels in Syria and the Holy Land, 636.