While the ombwiri is indeed feared, it is with a respectful reverence, different from the dread of an ibambo. Ombwiri is fine and admirable in aspect, but is very rarely seen; it is white, like a white person. Souls of distinguished chiefs and other great men turn to awiri. The fear with which the native regards massive rocks and large trees--the ombwiri homes--need not be felt by white people, who are themselves considered awiri, without its being clearly understood whether their bodies are inhabited by the departed spirits of the Negro dead, or whether some came from other sources. The awiri are generally favorably disposed, especially to their former human relatives; but it is necessary to gratify them with religious services constituting an ancestral worship. While some of them reside in great rocks or trees, others dwell in rivers, lakes, and seas. Awiri, if they love a person and desire to favor him or her, have the special power to grant a gift desired by most Africans, _viz._, the birth of children. The awiri live mostly in the region of their own former human tribe. It is possible, however, for them to go everywhere; but they usually remain within their old tribal limits. If, however, a tribe should remove or become extinct, their awiri would still remain in that region, and would affiliate with the new people who might come to occupy the deserted village sites. Awiri have a period of inactivity, the cold dry season of four months (in western Equatorial Africa), May to September. At that time they become very small, inactive, and almost lifeless (a condition of hibernation, somewhat like that of bears; or of inertia, as when a snake casts its skin?). 4. There is another class of spirits called _Sinkinda_ (singular, "nkinda"), some of whom are the spirits of people who in the ordinary stations of life were "common," or not distinguished for greatness or goodness. Others of these sinkinda are of uncertain origin, perhaps demons whom Njambi had created, but to whom He had never given bodily existence. Almost all sinkinda are evilly disposed. They come to the villages on visits to warm themselves by the kitchen fires or out of curiosity to see what is going on, and sometimes, temporarily, to enter into the bodies of the living, especially of their own family. The entrance of a nkinda into a human body always sickens the person. It may enter any one, even a child. If many of them enter a man's body, he becomes crazy. Sometimes the nkinda, when asked who he is, says: "I am a spirit of a member of your own family, and I have come to live with you. I am tired of living in the forest with cold and hunger. I wish to stay with you." Often when people are sick with fever or cold, the diagnosis is made that some nkinda has come on a visit. If it is of the same family as those whom it is visiting, it comes and goes from time to time, to please itself; but it is never, like an uvengwa, visible.