but some kind of devil-doctor
or medicine-man, and, as I understood it, they took on themselves and
expiated the sins of the Kling community for the past year (a big job, if
thieving and lying count; probably not). They are not, however, always
so lucky, for I heard that on the next occasion one of the men fell and
was terribly burnt, thus destroying the whole effect of the ceremony. I
do not think this to be any part of the Brahmanical religion, though the
ordeal by fire as a test of guilt is, or was, in use all over India. The
fact is that the races of Southern India, where the Aryan element is very
small, have kept all their savage customs and devil-worship under the
form of Brahmanism.

'Another curious feat I saw performed at Labuan Deli, in Sumatra, on the
Chinese New Year. A Chinaman of the coolie class was squatted stark
naked on the roadside, holding on his knees a brass pan the size of a
wash-hand basin, piled a foot high with red-hot charcoal. The heat
reached one's face at two yards, but if it had been a tray of ices the
man couldn't have been more unconcerned. There was a crowd of Chinese
round him, all eagerly asking questions, and a pile of coppers
accumulating beside him. A Chinese shopkeeper told me that the man "told
fortunes," but from the circumstance of a gambling-house being close by,
I concluded that his customers were getting tips on a system.

'Hoping these notes may be of service to you,
'I remain,
'Yours truly,
'STEPHEN PONDER.'

* * * * *

In this rite the fire-pit is thrice as long (at a rough estimate) as that
of the Fijians. The fire is of wooden embers, not heated stones. As in
Fiji, a man who falls is burned, clearly suggesting that the feet and
legs, but not the whole body, are in some way prepared to resist the
fire. As we shall find to be the practice in Bulgaria, the celebrants
place their feet afterwards in water. As in Bulgaria, drums are beaten
to stimulate the fire-walkers. Neither here nor in Fiji are the
performers said to be entranced, like the Bulgarian Nistinares. {161} On
the whole, the Kling rite (which the Klings, I am informed, also practise
in the islands whither they are carried as coolies) so closely resembles
the Fijian and the Tongan that one would explain the likeness by
transmission, were the ceremony not almost as like the rite of the Hirpi.
For the Tongan fire-ritual, the source is The Polynesian Society's
Journal, vol. ii. No. 2. pp. 105-10