Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/43

Rh indicate a real if remote relationship between them and the Masai, who so long remained an ethnological puzzle.) "Amongst the Moi clan" [of the Nandi] says Mr. Hollis, "there is a tradition that the first Dorobo gave birth to a boy and a girl. His leg swelled up one day and became pregnant. At length it burst, and a boy issued from the inner side of his calf, whilst a girl issued from the outer side. These two in course of time had children, who were the ancestors of all the people upon earth."

With the Masai, the myth has passed into a folk-tale, in which all connection with the origin of mankind is lost. An old man, "who was unmarried and lived alone in his hut," produced two children in the manner above indicated and lived happily with them till they were stolen by a cannibal: the story developing on the familiar Red"Red [sic]-Riding-hood" or "Tselane" lines. (The end shows some confusion with a different type of story; but that does not concern us just now.)

A curious echo of this myth is found among the Wakuluwe at the southern end of Lake Tanganyika: "Ngulwe caused the first woman to bring forth a child, Kanga Masala, from her knee."—Further, I have come across two remarkable traces of it in folk-tales—once in connection with the hero promised before birth to an animal (or demon), who frustrates all the devices employed for his destruction; and once in a Delagoa Bay version of the "Swallowing Monster" myth. The first is found in Mr. Rattray's collection from Nyasaland, where the mother of Kachirambe, after promising the hyaena, whose "egg" she had destroyed, "When I have a child, you shall eat him," "saw a boil in her shin-bone, and it burst, and there