dy is supposed to die the victim of the sorcerer's
diabolic art. If a relation of yours dies, the people comfort you by
saying, "Cursed be the sorcerer who caused his death!" If your horse
falls down a precipice and breaks its back, the accident has been caused
by the malicious look of a sorcerer. If your dog dies of hydrophobia or
your horse of a carbuncle, the cause is still the same. If you catch a
fever in a district where malaria abounds, the malady is still ascribed
to the art of the sorcerer, who has insinuated some deadly substances
into your body.[40] Again, speaking of the Sakalava, a tribe in
Madagascar, an eminent French authority on the island observes: "They
have such a faith in the power of talismans that they even ascribe to
them the power of killing their enemies. When they speak of poisoning,
they do not allude, as many Europeans wrongly suppose, to death by
vegetable or mineral poisons; the reference is to charms or spells. They
often throw under the bed of an enemy an _ahouli_ [talisman], praying it
to kill him, and they are persuaded that sooner or later their wish will
be accomplished. I have often been present at bloody vendettas which had
no other origin but this. The Sakalava think that a great part of the
population dies of poison in this way. In their opinion, only old people
who have attained the extreme limits of human longevity die a natural
death."[41]

[Sidenote: Belief of African tribes in sorcery as the cause of sickness
and death.]

In Africa similar beliefs are widely spread and lead, as elsewhere, to
fatal consequences. Thus the Kagoro of Northern Nigeria refuse to
believe in death from natural causes; all illnesses and deaths, in their
opinion, are brought about by black magic, however old and decrepit the
deceased may have been. They explain sickness by saying that a man's
soul wanders from his body in sleep and may then be caught, detained,
and even beaten with a stick by some evil-wisher; whenever that happens,
the man naturally falls ill. Sometimes an enemy will abstract the
patient's liver by magic and carry it away to a cave in a sacred grove,
where he will devour it in company with other wicked sorcerers. A
witch-doctor is called in to detect the culprit, and whomever he
denounces is shut up in a room, where a fire is kindled and pepper
thrown into it; and there he is kept in the fumes of the burning pepper
till he confesses his guilt and returns the stolen liver, upon which