TRAVELS IN 
whom the inquiry is made, Avhich was far from being our case 
in the present instance. The king being asked if they had any 
beUef in a supernatural power, and, if so, what were their 
notions concerning it? replied, that they believed in the ex- 
istence of some invisible power that sometimes brought good 
and sometimes evil upon them ; it was this power that caused 
men to die suddenly, or before they arrived at years of matu- 
rity ; that raised the wind, and made thunder and lightning to 
frighten, and sometimes to kill them ; that led the sun across 
the world in the day.; and the moon by night ; and that made 
all those things which they could neither understand nor imi- 
tate. I then shewed him my watch ; and from his great sur- 
prise it was clear he had never seen one before. On examin- 
ing attentively the movements, and observing that the motion 
was continued in his own hands, he looked at the surround- 
ing spectators, and pronounced emphatically the vfovA feegas, 
which was echoed back with a nod of the head from the whole 
crowd. Concerning this word the Hottentot interpreter could 
get no other information than that it was some influence of the 
dead over the living in instigating and directing the actions of 
the latter. He called it a ghost or spirit, and said it was the 
Kaffer way of swearing. It appeared that if a Kaffer swore 
by a deceased relation, his oath was considered as inviolable. 
A promise was always held sacred when a piece of metal was 
broken between the parties; a practice not unlike the breaking 
of a sixpence between two parting lovers, still kept up in some 
country places of England. That these people have not bewil- 
dered their imaginations so far with metaphysical ideas of the 
immortality of the soul, as the more civihzed part of mankind 
Jias exercised the reasoning faculties on this subject, and that 
Q 
