“Sun! I do this that you may be burning hot, and eat up all the clouds in the sky.” The same ceremony is repeated at sunset.​[1099] The New Caledonians also make a drought by means of a disc-shaped stone with a hole in it. At the moment when the sun rises, the wizard holds the stone in his hand and passes a burning brand repeatedly into the hole, while he says: “I kindle the sun, in order that he may eat up the clouds and dry up our land, so that it may produce nothing.”​[1100] When the sun rises behind clouds—a rare event in the bright sky of southern Africa—the Sun clan of the Bechuanas say that he is grieving their heart. All work stands still, and all the food of the previous day is given to matrons or old women. They may eat it and may share it with the children they are nursing, but no one else may taste it. The people go down to the river and wash themselves all over. Each man throws into the river a stone taken from his domestic hearth, and replaces it with one picked up in the bed of the river. On their return to the village the chief kindles a fire in his hut, and all his subjects come and get a light from it. A general dance follows.​[1101] In these cases it seems that the lighting of the flame on earth is supposed to rekindle the solar fire. Such a belief comes naturally to people who, like the Sun clan of the Bechuanas, deem themselves the veritable kinsmen of the sun. When the sun is obscured by clouds, the Lengua Indians of the Gran Chaco hold burning sticks towards him to encourage the luminary,​[1102] or rather perhaps to {p314} rekindle his seemingly expiring light. The Banks Islanders make sunshine by means of a mock sun. They take a very round stone, called a _vat loa_ or sunstone, wind red braid about it, and stick it with owls’ feathers to represent rays, singing the proper spell in a low voice. Then they hang it on some high tree, such as a banyan or a casuarina, in a sacred place. Or the stone is laid on the ground with white rods radiating from it to imitate sunbeams.​[1103] Sometimes the mode of making sunshine is the converse of that of making rain. Thus we have seen that a white or red victim is sacrificed for sunshine, while a black one is sacrificed for rain.​[1104] Some of the New Caledonians drench a skeleton to make rain, but burn it to make sunshine.​[1105] [Sidenote: Sun-charms among the American Indians. Human sacrifices offered to the sun by the Mexicans. Greek sacrifices of horses to the sun.]