rock, they could have no subterranean passage to the river, v/hich ran about three hundred yards below the hill. Can it be that they have the power of combining by vital force the oxygen and hydrogen of their vegetable food so as to form water ? [1]
Rain, however, would not fall; the Bakwains believed that I had bound Sechele with some magic spell, and I received deputations of the old counsellors, entreating me to allow him to make only a few showers: "The corn will die if you refuse, and we shall become scattered. Only let him make rain this once, and we shall all, men, women, and children, come to the school and sing and pray as long as you please."
The method by which the natives imagine they can charm the clouds to pour out their refreshing treasure is by burning a variety of preparations, such as charcoal made of bats; inspissated renal deposit [2] of the mountain coney (Hyrax capensis), which is also used in the form of pills as a good antispasmodic; jackals' livers, baboons' and lions' hearts, hairy calculi from the bowels of old cows, serpents' skins and vertebrae, and every kind of tuber, root, and plant to be found in the country. Conscious that civility is useful everywhere, you kindly state that you think they are mistaken as to their power; the rain-doctor selects a particular bulb, pounds it, and administers a cold infusion to a sheep, which in five minutes afterwards expires in convulsions. Part of the same bulb is converted into smoke, and ascends towards the sky; rain follows in a day or two. The inference is obvious. "Were we as much harassed by droughts, the logic would be irresistible in England in 1857.
The Bakwains still went on treating us with kindness, and I am not aware of ever having had an enemy in the tribe; but as they believed that there must be some connection between the presence of "God's Word "in their town and these successive droughts, they looked with no good will at the church-bell." "We like you," said the uncle of Sechele, a very influential and sensible person, " as well as if you had been boiix among us; you are the only white man we can
