Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/356

348 objective fact. Those referred to relate to the power said to be possessed by certain wizards on the one hand, and magicians or doctors on the other, of sending people to sleep, or into a trance, and then tormenting, and even mutilating them, without their experiencing any sensations of pain. One man I heard of, but who was dead a good many years, was said to possess this power, and persons were mentioned who had been the victims of his evil influence and machinations. Into the truth of the specific statements I did not inquire at the time, but one story, a fair sample of those told, ran thus: A young woman against whom he had a grudge met him in the fields. He spoke to her, and after a little she fell asleep. When she awoke and returned home it was discovered that her ears were slit, and that she had been mutilated in various ways. She said she had no consciousness of pain, and did not know she had been injured till she saw blood on her person.

Other and more improbable legends abound, which attribute to wizards not only the power of hypnotising their victims, but of conveying them from place to place with incredible swiftness, or sending them for weeks or even months into the mountains and forests to eat grass like oxen, as happened to the famous Babylonian monarch, and finally reducing them to be their own slaves or drudges, after the manner of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Whether there can be any truth in such legends culled from among a barbarous people, those learned in the "uncanny arts" must be left to determine.

As in nature there is but a step from birds to butterflies, so in Africa there is but a step from magic to music, and the feats of Orpheus are nothing compared to the doings of bards and singers of a long forgotten past in the Dark Continent. Of extant musical instruments there are very few, and these are not of particularly complex construction. A dried elephant's ear makes a very serviceable drum; two hard bits of stick or bone a suitable accompaniment