Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/359

Rh "No; no one can tell. The spirits taught men long ago. They are angry with their children, and show them nothing now. It was not man who made this [playing a few bars]; and it is because the spirits do not speak to singers that one cannot play. [sic] The children are forgetting."

So the conversation would meander on with much sadness and some truth; for it is a fact that the old life is passing away, and the new has not yet taken hold of the popular imagination. Before we parted it was generally asserted that the spirits would one day speak, and restore the old order, when men would once more learn to sing as do the gods.

Their lyrics are mostly in praise of ancestors, warriors, cattle, the seasons and crops, rain, sunshine, domestic virtue and valour. These the bards sing, adding a verse or altering a phrase to suit the occasion. I have heard old and well-known verses so transformed as to be almost past recognition, and that impromptu. These ditties the bards sing and set to music; and there is every reason to believe that their music has the authority of thousands of years. The dancing-steps of to-day are those depicted, as performed by slaves, in wall-paintings of ancient Egypt, and there seems no doubt that, then as now, they were danced to the same musical notes, played on instruments identical in form and melody to those of the present time.

There is one species of dance popular among Bushmen, never indulged in by Bantu, to which some slight reference may be made. It is called "Porrah", or Devil-dance, and in the performance of which they work themselves into a state of perfect frenzy, continuing till they fall down in a kind of epileptic stupor. Of this they are relieved by being pricked with sharp thorns or large pins. The dance may be performed singly or by a number capering in concert, and is always accompanied by smoking a weed known as dara, which is really a species of hemp. When the pipe is ready they sit down in a circle and each takes a single pull. As the pipe goes round, first one and then another,