Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/350

342 saved by "the wisdom of the father of the people". He became a mighty man of valour, and when the old chief grew blind he waited upon him as his companion and principal councillor. Finally he rose to be a great man, and founded a dynasty of chiefs and warriors whose descendants are "great men among the people far north" to this day.

The elephant is a sacred animal with most Africans, and is greatly revered by all. There is a legend floating among the coast natives, and well known to the hillmen of Basutoland, that, were elephants exterminated, forest-trees would cease to grow. These huge animals feed largely on leaves and tender branches of trees, hence the supposed connection between them and forest timber. Nor is proof of the tradition wanting, if anyone desires to have it. There are large tracts of treeless grasslands in South Africa. The people who dwelt on these, "long ago", killed the elephants, and all the trees of their country died.

To the Bathlapin the crocodile is sacred, and by all it is revered, but rather under the form of fear than affection. I have often thought that the river "calling" of South Africa, where there are no crocodiles, is the survival of an ancient recollection of the time when the ancestors of the present Kaffirs dwelt on the margin of rivers infested by these murderous brutes, and where they often saw their women drawn underneath when going to the river to fetch water.

Iron is the sacred object among the Baralongs. They are expert workers in metal, which they still smelt from its native ore by the most primitive methods ever devised by man. The process is as follows:—They select a hollow stone of considerable size, and chisel out a narrow grove, along which the molten metal may flow. A hole is next bored, generally underneath, to admit the clay nozzle of a primitive bellows. The furnace is now complete, and the ore, mixed with charcoal, is piled up in a conical heap on