Page:Further India; (IA furtherindia00clif).pdf/61

they say that if any nourishment remained in the bones this would breed worms, and then the worms would die for want of food, and the death of these worms would be laid to the charge of the deceased man's soul. And so they eat him up stump and rump. And when they have eaten him they collect his bones and put them in fine chests, and carry them away, and place them in caverns among the mountains where no beast nor other creature can get at them. And you must know also that if they take prisoner a man of another country, and he cannot pay ransom in coin, they kill and eat him straightway. It is a very evil custom and a parlous."

As every one has learned from experience, who has himself made some attempt to collect versions of local superstitions, to examine quaint customs, and to seek for their explanations from the people among whom they prevail, it is fatally easy to misconceive and misinterpret if long and familiar intercourse has not given to the enquirer a very thorough understanding of and sympathy with the native point of view. One and the same practice, regarded from the standpoint of those to whom immemorial usage has made it a matter of course, and from that of the stranger who lights upon it unexpectedly, assumes wholly different aspects and proportions, and to this fact is due more than half the cock-and-bull stories and patently absurd explanations which to this day travellers bring back with them from their sojourns among peoples whom they have imperfectly comprehended.

Of Lambri—the Lambrij of de Barros, the Al Ramni of the Arabs—a State which seems to have been situated