FASCICULI MALATENSES 
43 
good Mahommedan ; and when we began to write in our diaries at this place 
our host became very alarmed, and begged a Siamese official who was travelling 
with us to ask us to desist. With some trouble I found out what was the 
matter-—the man was afraid that we were writing charms to attract the pekstt 
of a woman who lived in the district, and he believed that the mere fact that 
anyone in any house was writing Siamese, Chinese, or any ‘science* (biimu )— 
in which category he evidently included English—would attract pelestt to that 
house and cause them to devour the liver, or the soul, of its inmates. Our 
own followers told u$ that the witch to whom he alluded was notorious, and 
that she was then living at Kampong Jalor as the wife of the Chinese opium- 
farmer. She had been the daughter of a Bangkok Siamese of high rank and 
had married a former raja mudab of Jalor, but had studied magic in order to 
make herself beautiful, and had finally made a familiar. This familiar she had 
sent to feed on a child, as a bbmw had discovered, and the raja had ordered his 
heir to divorce her, had sent a famous medicine-man to free her of her familiar 
without success, and had finally banished her from his state. The establish- 
ment of Siamese power in Jalor had permitted her to return, and she had 
married again several times, each of her husbands divorcing her in turn because of 
her witchcraft, until she had sunk so low that she was glad to marry a Chinaman. 
On our return to Kampong Jalor we sent a message inviting her to visit us. 
She replied that she had often wished to do so, as she had some things which 
she thought we would like to buy, but had been afraid that we would cause 
our men to drive her away. Next day she came, accompanied by a young 
woman to whom it was said that she had taught her evil arts, bringing some 
magnificent neolithic implements, which we purchased from her. She was a 
stately woman of middle age, dressed in a robe of purple silk, with golden 
hairpins in her well-oiled hair; but the most noticeable thing about her was a 
peculiar cast in both eyes that gave her the appearance of attempting to look 
at the ground and up to the person she was addressing at the same time. This 
was said to be proof positive that she kept a peksti. The burden of her 
conversation was pathetic—* I was a raja once. 1 We did not question her about 
her familiars, for she was said to utterly deny having anything to do with such 
things, and we were warned not to speak of them. 
People who keep familiars of this kind must send them to feed on the 
souls of others, in addition to giving them of their own blood, drawn from 
the middle finger; and if they are ill their familiars run riot, ‘just like naughty 
children,* eating the souls of all they meet. By this means witches can 
revenge them on their enemies, and when a person is possessed of a spirit, 
the medicine-man generally proceeds on the presumption that the spirit is a 
