SUPERSTITIONS. 



423 



intense affection. It is a superstition common to 

 the Western East, and I have found it in India 

 and Sind, in Peru and Egypt. Ghosts and larvae 

 haunt the houses in which men have died, a 

 Eetish helief which does not properly belong to El 

 Islam or to Christianity : the British Consulate 

 has a bad name on account of the terrible fate of 

 its owner, the late Sayyid's nephew. Descended 

 from ' devil-worshippers,' the Wasawahili rather 

 fear the ' Shaytani ' than love Allah, and to the 

 malignant powers of preternatural beings they 

 attribute sickness and all the evils of human life. 

 A Zanzibar negroid will not even fetch a leech 

 from the marsh, for fear of offending him to 

 whom the animal is £ Ju-ju,' or sacred. 



Generally, the Msawahili Alim or literato, 

 though capable of reading the Koran, cannot write 

 a common Arabic letter. Some, however, attain 

 high proficiency : I may quote as an instance the 

 Kazi Muhiyy el Din. These negroids begin arith- 

 metic early, a practice which, perhaps, they have 

 learned from the Banyans. They excel in memory 

 and in quickness of apprehension from early child- 

 hood to the age of puberty : the same has been 

 remarked about the Arabs, and Anglo-Indians 

 observe it in the natives of Hindostan. Whether 

 at the virile epoch there is an arrest of develop- 



