CUSTOMS AND SUPERSTITIONS 323 



And of all these dances the only one that I saw 

 performed was the Ukumbwaya. Three men, naked 

 except for a small kilt of dried grass, grovelled on 

 the ground on their knees and elbows, each one holding 

 in his hand a cow's horn stuffed full of brown roots. 

 But I could not discover what plants the roots belonged 

 to or for what purpose they were ultimately used. 

 Standing round the three men were a number of 

 women, whose faces were painted with white stripes 

 and dots, and who chanted monotonously and clapped 

 their blocks of wood together. 



I was able to watch them only for a short time, 

 because as soon as I was observed the three men jumped 

 up and fled into the bush. After some difficulty I 

 caught one of them. The interpreter spoke to him 

 in Swahili, but he showed no signs of understanding ; 

 then one of the women came forward and spoke to him 

 in a languag'e that none of us knew, and the man 

 answered in a shrill, stammering, falsetto voice in the 

 same tongue . 



I spent some time talking to the man, the woman 

 translating ; but I could get no intelligent answers 

 from him, and I came to the conclusion that he was an 

 idiot. But a few days later I met the same man walk- 

 ing through a clove plantation dressed in a clean white 

 shirt and wearing a red fez with a black tassel. He 

 stopped and spoke to us in excellent Swahili, and made 

 many shrewd remarks, but denied all knowledge of the 

 dances in which he had been performing. No doubt 

 on the previous occasion he was speaking in the 

 language proper to the dance, for all the performers 

 must speak only the language of the tribe with whom 

 the dance originated." 



