320 SPORT, TRAVEL, AND ADVENTURE 



difficulty they made him understand that his Afrite was 

 a valuable white marble statue, which he had entirely 

 destroyed. Later on we found the pieces. 



If on that occasion the devil of Bumna played the 

 future excavators a bad turn through the destruction 

 of a marble statue, it once unconsciously did them a 

 great favour. A ' sain,' Abd el-Kader, the same in 

 whose honour the first station of the Mariut Railway is 

 named, came to Bumna soon after the rising of Arabi 

 Pasha, and induced by the splendid building material 

 lying about, wanted to qrect a Zauja and a mosque. 

 Naturally he sought to procure water and to put an 

 ancient cistern into working order. Then one evening 

 the Bumna Afrite warned him not to dig farther. But 

 Sidi Abd el-Kader did not heed the mysterious voice, 

 and the next day his slave was found dead in the 

 cistern. He was killed by a falling block of stone, 

 but everybody saw the hand of the Afrite in the event. 

 The slave was named Abd er-Rahman, and came from 

 Fessan. He was buried on a hill of the city of Menas, 

 and the inscription on his tomb is now in the Frankfort 

 Museum." 



Captain Craster, in his book on Pemba, 1 the Spice 

 Island of Zanzibar, gives the following details of the 

 native superstitions. He says : "I discovered that 

 there were two tribes of devils in Pemba the Geni 

 and the Kibwengu, the former ranking first in the 

 social scale. The Geni came to Pemba with the Arabs, 

 and are generally to be found near the sea-coast. 

 Subian is the king of the Geni, and is also the god of 

 healing. Makata is the second of the Geni, and the 

 head slave of Subian ; his special duty is to protect 

 * See Bibliography, 24. 



