During a tempest the inhabitants of a Batta village in Sumatra have been seen to rush from their houses armed with sword and lance. The rajah placed himself at their head, and with shouts and yells they hewed and hacked at the invisible foe. An old woman was observed to be specially active in the defence of her house, slashing the air right and left with a long sabre.​[1188] In a violent thunderstorm, the peals sounding very near, the Kayans of Borneo have been seen to draw their swords threateningly half out of their scabbards, as if to frighten away the demons of the storm.​[1189] In Australia the huge columns of red sand that move rapidly across a desert tract are thought by the natives to be spirits passing along. Once {p331} an athletic young black ran after one of these moving columns to kill it with boomerangs. He was away two or three hours, and came back very weary, saying he had killed Koochee (the demon), but that Koochee had growled at him and he must die.​[1190] Of the Bedouins of eastern Africa it is said that “no whirlwind ever sweeps across the path without being pursued by a dozen savages with drawn creeses, who stab into the centre of the dusty column in order to drive away the evil spirit that is believed to be riding on the blast.”​[1191] [Sidenote: Fighting the simoom.] In the light of these examples a story told by Herodotus, which his modern critics have treated as a fable, is perfectly credible. He says, without however vouching for the truth of the tale, that once in the land of the Psylli, the modern Tripoli, the wind blowing from the Sahara had dried up all the water-tanks. So the people took counsel and marched in a body to make war on the south wind. But when they entered the desert the simoom swept down on them and buried them to a man.​[1192] The story may well have been told by one who watched them disappearing, in battle array, with drums and cymbals beating, into the red cloud of whirling sand. {p332} CHAPTER VI MAGICIANS AS KINGS [Sidenote: Social importance of magicians and their rise to the position of chiefs or kings. But magic is not the only road by which men have travelled to a throne. Complexity of the social phenomena and the danger of simplifying them unduly by our hypotheses.]