According to Dr. Turner, “The real gods at Tana may be said to be the disease-makers. It is surprising how these men are dreaded, and how firm the belief is that they have in their hands the power of life and death. There are rain-makers and thunder-makers, and fly and mosquito-makers, and a host of other ‘sacred men,’ but the disease-makers are the most dreaded. It is believed that these men can create disease and death by burning what is called _nahak_. _Nahak_, means rubbish, but principally refuse of food. Everything of the kind they bury or throw into the sea, lest the disease-makers should get hold of it. These fellows are always about, and consider it their special business to pick up and burn, with certain formalities, anything in the _nahak_ line which comes in their way. If a disease-maker sees the skin of a banana, for instance, he picks it up, wraps it in a leaf, and wears it all day hanging round his neck. The people stare as they see him go along, and say to each other, ‘He has got something; he will do for somebody by-and-by at night.’ In the evening he scrapes some bark off a tree, mixes it up with the banana skin, rolls all up tightly in a leaf in the form of a cigar, and then puts the one end close enough to the fire to cause it to singe, and smoulder, and burn away very gradually. Presently he hears a shell blowing. ‘There,’ he says to his friends, ‘there it is; that is the man whose rubbish I am now burning, he is ill; let us stop burning, and see what they bring in the morning.’ When a person is taken ill he believes that it is occasioned by some one burning his rubbish. Instead of thinking about medicine, he calls some one to blow a shell, a large conch or other shell, which, when perforated and blown, can be heard two or three miles off. The meaning of it is to implore the person who is supposed to be burning the sick man’s rubbish and causing all the pain to stop burning; and it is a promise as well that a present will be taken in the morning. The greater the pain the more they blow the shell, and when the pain abates they cease, supposing that the disease-maker has been kind enough to stop burning.” Night after night the silence is broken by the dismal too-too-tooing of these shells; and in the morning the friends of the sufferer repair to the disease-maker with presents of pigs, mats, hatchets, beads, {p342} whales’ teeth, or suchh like things.​[1214] Thus these sorcerers attain to a position of immense power and influence and acquire wealth by purely maleficent magic; it is not by the imaginary benefits which they confer on the community, but by the imaginary evils which they inflict on individuals, that they climb the steps of a throne or the ladder that leads to heaven; for according to Dr. Turner these rascals are on the highroad to divinity. The process which they employ to accomplish their ends is a simple application of the principles of contagious magic: