________________
JULY, 1890.]
THE ABORIGINES OF SOKOTRA.
197
all to 'no purpose, for they insist that their forefathers followed it, and so must they also. I will give yon a sample of their enchantments. Thus if a ship be sailing past with a fair wind and a strong, they will raise a contrary wind and compel her to turn back. In fact they mako the wind blow as they list, and produce great tempests and disasters, and other such sorceries they perform, which it will be better to say nothing about in our Book."21 The language spoken by the Harranis was Aramaic.22 Whether any affinity exists between it and Soķotran is a question to be discussed later on.
Those notices of the Harranis are introduced, not with the object of proving any connexion between them and the Sokotrans, but merely to throw a light on the nnturo of planetary worship, which appears to have been the religion of the island previous to the birth of Christianity.
Exposure of the aged and sick was another singular custom practised by the Soķotrars: it is thus described by Wellsted (pp. 278-80): -
“One intensely hot day I was strolling along the beach, when my attention was arrested by perceiving something lying there, which an Arab was just leaving. It was an okl man stretched on his back, in a hollow scooped out of the sand; nothing butu tattered piece of cloth protecting him from the fiery heat of the sun's rays; before him were some grain und rug. ments of half-broiled fish : but he was evidently in the last stage of existence. His companion told me that when a man or woman became unable to work, it was customary thus to expose them; food, however, being brought until they expire, when a little earth thrown over thern completes their half-formed grave. Such is custom ! Yet even this, barbarous as it is, is an improvement on that which formerly was practised.
"An old writer, speaking of the inhabitants of Sokotra, says that "they generally bary their sick before they breathe their last, making no distinction between a dying and a dead person. They esteem it a duty to put the patient as soon as possible out of pain, and make this their request to their friends, when they are on a sick bed — which in all acute disorders, may be called their death-bed. When the father of a family finds himself thus circumstanced, and has reason to believe his dissolution is approaching, he assembles his children round him, vrliether natural or adopted, his parents, wives, servants, and all his acquaintances, whom he strongly exhorts to a compliance with the following articles of his last will never to admit any alteration in the customs or doctrines of their ancestors; never to intermarry with foreigners; nerer to permit an affront done to them or their predecessors, or a boast stolen from cither of them, to go unpunished; and, lastly, never to suffer a friend to lio in pain, when they can relieve him by death.
"They commonly perform the last request of the dying man by means of a white liquor, of a strongly poisonous quality, which oozes from a treo peculiar to the island. Hence it is that legal murders are more common here than in any country in the world; for, besides the inhuman castom last mentioned, the other requests of dying men produce numberless quarrels, and, br taking revenge of the injuries done to their ancestors, entail family feuds and bloodshed upon their posterity for a long series of years.
"Such were the inhabitants of Sokotra in the seventeenth century."
Wellsted does not mention the name of the writer of the account which he quotes, and I have not been able to find it in any of the collections of voyages and travels. The intenso conservation displayed in the injunction, "Never to aclmit any alteration in the custumis or doctrines of their ancestors,' accounts for the preservation of so many pagan customs, apparently of extremely ancient origin. The lex talionis is by no means peculiar to Soķotra : it obtaius among most savage nations, especially among the Somalis, who look upon murder as a private offence - not a public one.
Having now related all that can be gathered regarding the early form of religion among 21 Yule's Marco Polo, Vol. II., Chap. 32, 2nd Ed. 22. Sprenger's El Mas'adi, p. 213, notes.
