Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/129

 of Sociology and Folklore. 1 1 9

a conical roof made of the mid-ribs of the coco palm or laths of the areca, and with the leaves of the latter the floor is carpeted. These houses have not a nail or peg in the entire structure, the joints being neatly fitted and tied with wisps of cane. In spite of their fragility they stand the violent gales of the monsoon.^ In Masulipatam that observant traveller, John Fryer, remarked that the poorer houses, " both in their High Streets and Allies, are thatched, cast round as Beehives, and walled with mud." ^ In un- sheltered places and at the headquarters of septs the Andamanese built circular huts with eaves nearly touching the ground.^ The same form is adopted by some of the nomad tribes. The pastoral Baloch, for instance, use a number of long slender poles, bent towards each other, over which are laid pieces of coarse camel-hair felt.* Among the same people only the \vell-to-do use even sun-dried bricks in house building ; most of them build with stone and mud with rafters covered with palm leaves, and on the top thick layers of plaster. But one of the tribes will not plaster their roofs because an ancestor died under a plastered roof. Many have merely a " lodge in a garden of cucumbers," but the most characteristic shelter is the hut made of a few bent poles and goats' hair matting.^

This early form of circular hut, owing to hieratic con- servatism, survives in round temples, like that of Vesta in Rome, and in some Christian Churches, like that of the Temple, St. Sepulchre at Cambridge, Little Maplesteed in Essex and St. Sepolchro at Bologna, besides several in Rome, derived from the round temple of pagan times. *"

^Journal Anthropological Institute, xxxii. 236 f.

"A New Account of East-India and Persia, ed. 1 909, i. 80.

•* Census Report, 1 901, 61.

■*A. W. Hughes, The Country of Balochistan, 39.

^Census Report, Baluchistan, 191 1, i. 27.

"S. O. Addy, The Evolution of the House, i. et set/.; L. R. Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, v. 99; Encyclopaedia Britannica, nth ed. iv. 178, xxiii. 609.