Hence every year, about October, Zulu men, women, and children have a small piece of skin cut from the back of the left hand, and the poison of a snake, mixed with spittle, is rubbed into the wound. No snake will ever approach a man who has thus been inoculated; and what is even more curious, if the shadow of an inoculated man should touch the shadow of a man who has not been inoculated, the latter will fall down as if he had been shot, overcome by the poison transmitted through the shadow: so exceedingly virulent is the virus.(504) Among the Jukos, a tribe of the Benue River in Northern Nigeria, before a hunter goes forth to hunt elephants, he makes four cuts in his left arm and rubs in “medicine”; this helps him to see the beast next day.(505) (M125) Again, the Zulus know how to inoculate themselves not merely with moral virtue, but even with celestial power. For you must know that the Zulus have heaven-herds or sky-herds, who drive away clouds big with hail and lightning, just as herdsmen drive cattle before them. These heaven-herds are in sympathy with the heaven. For when the heaven is about to be darkened, and before the clouds appear or the thunder mutters, the heart of the heaven-herd feels it coming, for it is hot within him and he is excited by anger. When the sky begins to be overcast, he too grows dark like it; when it thunders, he frowns, that his face may be black as the scowl of the angry heaven. Now the way in which he thus becomes sympathetic with all the changing moods of the inconstant heaven is this: he eats the heaven and scarifies himself with it. And the way in which he eats the heaven and scarifies himself with it is as follows. When a bullock is struck by lightning, the wizard takes its flesh and puts it in a sherd and eats it while it is hot, mixed with medicine; and thus he eats the heaven by eating the flesh, which came from the beast, which was struck by the lightning, which came down from the heaven. And in like manner he scarifies himself with the heaven, for he makes cuts in his body and rubs in medicine mixed with the flesh of a bullock that was struck by lightning.(506) In some Caffre tribes, when an animal or a man has been struck by lightning, the priest comes straightway and vaccinates every person in the kraal, apparently as a sort of insurance against lightning. He sets to work by tying a number of charms round the neck of every man and woman in the village, in order that they may have power to dig the dead man’s grave; for in these tribes beasts and men alike that have been struck by lightning are always buried, and the flesh is never eaten. Next a sacrificial beast is killed and a fire kindled, in which certain magic woods or roots are burned to charcoal, and then ground to powder. The priest thereupon makes incisions in various parts of the bodies of each inmate of the kraal, and rubs a portion of the powdered charcoal into the cuts; the rest of the powder he mixes with sour milk, and gives to them