asked reply in the phrase which an Englishman hates, "Inshallah Bukra"—"if Allah please, to-morrow!"—and they have the decency not to appear in public at the hours of devotion. The Somal, like most Africans, are of a somewhat irreverent turn of mind.[1] When reproached with gambling, and asked why they persist in the forbidden pleasure, they simply answer, "Because we like." One night, encamped among the Ísa, I was disturbed by a female voice indulging in the loudest lamentations: an elderly lady, it appears, was suffering from tooth-ache, and the refrain of her groans was, "O Allah, may thy teeth ache like mine! O Allah, may thy gums be sore as mine are!" A well-known and characteristic tale is told of the Jirad Hirsi, now chief of the Berteri tribe. Once meeting a party of unarmed
- ↑ "Tuarick grandiloquence," says Richardson (vol. i. p. 207), "savours of blasphemy, e.g., the lands, rocks, and mountains of Ghat do not belong to God but to the Azghar." Equally irreverent are the Kafirs of the Cape. They have proved themselves good men in wit as well as in war; yet, like the old Greenlanders and some of the Burmese tribes, they are apparently unable to believe in the existence of the Supreme. A favourite question to the missionaries was this, "Is your God white or black?" If the European, startled by the question, hesitated for a moment, they would leave him with open signs of disgust at having been made the victims of a hoax.
The assertion generally passes current that the idea of an Omnipotent Being is familiar to all people, even the most barbarous. My limited experience argues the contrary. Savages begin with fetishism and demon-worship, they proceed to physiolatry (the religion of the Vedas) and Sabæism: the deity is the last and highest pinnacle of the spiritual temple, not placed there except by a comparatively civilized race of high development, which leads them to study and speculate upon cosmical and psychical themes. This progression is admirably wrought out in Professor Max Müller's "Rig Veda Sanhita."
without, however, disbelieving in prayer, he is to be put to death, and receive Moslem burial; in the other contingency, he is not bathed, prayed for, or interred in holy ground. This severe order, however, lies in general abeyance.
