VI.] THE SOUTHERN MONGOLS. 193 



wanted to sacrifice a slave boy, but were talked over to substitute 

 some pariah dogs. They firmly believe in the evil eye, and the 

 Hakas think the Sujins and others are all wizards, whose single 

 glance can bewitch them, and may cause lizards to enter the body 

 and devour the entrails. A Chin once complained to Surgeon- 

 Major Newland that a nat had entered his stomach at the glance 

 of a Yahow, and he went to hospital quite prepared to die. But 

 an emetic brought him round, and he went off happy in the belief 

 that he had vomited the nat, 



Ethnically connected with the Kuki-Naga groups are the 

 Kakhyens of the Irawadi head-streams, and the 



Karens, who form numerous village communities e 



about the Burma-Siamese borderland. The Kakh- 



yens, so called abusively by the Burmese, are the Cacobees of the 



early writers 1 , whose proper name is Singpho (Chingpaw], i.e. 



"Men 2 ," and whose curious semi-agglutinating speech, spoken in 



an ascending tone, each sentence ending in a long-drawn / in a 



higher key (Bigandet), shows affinities rather with the Mishmi 



and other North Assamese tongues than with the cultured Bur- 



mese. They form a very wide-spread family, stretching from the 



Eastern Himalayas right into Yunnan, and presenting two some- 



what marked physical types: (i) the true Ching- 



paws, with short round head, low forehead, prominent Ei^m^nt^ 



cheek-bones, slant eye, broad nose, thick protruding 



lips, very dark brown hair and eyes, dirty buff colour, mean height 



(about 5ft. 5 or 6 in.) with disproportionately short legs; (2) a 



much finer race, with regular Caucasic features, long oval face, 



pointed chin aquiline nose. One Kakhyen belle met with at 



Bhamo, " with large lustrous eyes and fair skin, might almost have 



passed for a European 3 ." 



It is important to note this Caucasic element, which we first 

 meet here going eastwards from the Himalayas, but which is 



1 Dalton, Ethnology of Bengal, p. 9. 



2 Prince Henri d'Orleans writes "que les Singphos et les Katchins 

 [Kakhyens] ne font qu'un, que le premier mot est thai et le second birman " 

 (Du Tonkin aux Indes, 1898, p. 311). This is how the ethnical confusion in 

 these borderlands gets perpetuated. Singpho is not Thai, i.e. Shan or Siamese, 

 but a native word as here explained. 



3 Dr John Anderson, Mandalay to Moniein, 1876, p. 131. 



K. 13 



