of Edinhurgh, Session 1883 - 84 . 
333 
all. Her duties are domestic j she lights the fire, sweeps out the 
huts, fetches water twice a day from the river or well, makes butter, 
stores the food in jars, and cooks, &c. Children are early taught to 
he useful in helping their mother; and should she he ill, the husband 
fetches the water, lights the fire, and a neighbour is called in for 
aid, as the father cannot cook. Ho one is paid for such services 
any fixed price, hut some present is as a rule given. The women 
attend sick persons with much solicitude. 
The man’s work consists in hunting, fishing, agriculture, procuring 
wood for hows and arrows, and firewood. He partly makes the 
hows, milks the cows, and sometimes helps in making the butter. 
The men also build the huts. When removing from one place to 
another the men carry all the heavy things, as well as the roofs of the 
huts, and fix them before they fetch the w^omen. In hunting expe- 
ditions the women carry water in small jars for their husbands. 
Religion . — With regard to the religious beliefs of the people, I 
have not been able to ascertain much, their ideas being so vague 
that a much longer sojourn among them than I made would be 
necessary to discover what is really or partially believed by them. 
They appear to have an undefined belief in a great Being who 
made the world and men. They also believe in “isa” = the soul 
or thinking part of man, which however perishes with his body. 
There is no belief in a resurrection or after life for man, though 
ideas and speculations on the subject are indulged in. 
The first man is said to have come from the sky, but departed 
friends are thought of as being under ground, and their bodies are 
thought to turn into white ants, or to grow up as grass, mushrooms, &c. 
I have been told that sometimes people imagine they hear their 
departed friends speaking to them, and that when they look to see 
the familiar forms nothing is visible but smoke. When this happens 
there is a general lamentation among the friends of the departed, 
and a lamb is killed and its blood is sprinkled on them all. 
One man, tradition says, dreamt that his isa ” (soul) left his 
body sleeping, and went up to the sky. It is a common thing for 
lost friends to be seen in dreams, and to seem to turn into lions or 
some other object of terror. However vague their notions of a 
Deity or of themselves as spiritual beings may be, they teach and 
practise very sound principles of good. 
