Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/544

526 lead him into the swamps. Many persons, mistaking their light for that of a house, have thus followed them and been lost.

The approach of spirits menacing a household is announced by the hooting of the owl, "that hungry wild bird of the night with a cat's head and eyes," that scents death from afar. Then mothers tremble for their children. I have seen, in remote farmhouses, fragrant torches placed around the cradle, while the frightened mother stood with folded hands watching. Her fear ceased as soon as I came in, because she had a parang with her and was safe—for the Cambodians believe that these evil spirits keep well away from all places where Europeans dwell.

A more terrible and powerful class of spirits are the arac, or demons, who take possession of a body and bring death and madness to a whole family. Sometimes, to get more complete possession, the demon takes away the proper soul of the possessed, and hangs it on a tree, where it has miserably to wait for its reincarnation. The possessed ones behave very much like the hysterics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, suffering violent convulsions, and accusing this one or that one of having bewitched them.

The genii are as much feared as the demons, although they are regarded as being good; but as they have also the reputation of being just, they inspire dread, because one can never know when he may have given offense. They take possession of particular places—of mountains, forks of roads, roads, and rice fields—as their protecting and avenging spirits; and numerous spots are regarded with peculiar awe on account of their abiding there. The distinguishing trait between the demons and the genii is that the demons are always bad because they are never good, while the genii are friendly or hostile according to the character of the persons they are dealing with. The former are of infernal, the latter of human, origin. The genii are ancestors passed into oblivion, who, having no longer to watch over their direct descendants, watch over the whole country, over the Cambodian people, and are guardian angels of the nation, as the ancestors are the guardian angels of the family. The Cambodians see in them justice and often counselors to the people.

It was believed, according to an old tradition, that Buddha was to reappear before the year 1888 passed away, and the prediction threatened woe to those who did not prepare the ways. Taking this to refer to the roads, and to mean they should be prepared for the holy saint as they were for the king when he traveled, the people set themselves at work upon the required improvements. Stakes would be found in the morning, driven by no one knew whom, in places where they had not been, when men, women, and children would come out with shovels and hoes to remove the earth, and baskets to