Thus by celebrating the obsequies of a few locusts and beetles, they hope to bring about the death of them all.(820) When caterpillars invaded a vineyard or field in Syria, the virgins were gathered, and one of the caterpillars was taken and a girl made its mother. Then they bewailed and buried it. Thereafter they conducted the “mother” to the place where the caterpillars were, consoling her, in order that all the caterpillars might leave the garden.(821) On the first of September, Russian girls “make small coffins of turnips and other vegetables, enclose flies and other insects in them, and then bury them with a great show of mourning.”(822) In South Africa a plague of caterpillars is removed by a number of small Caffre girls, who go singing through the fields. They wail as they pass through the languishing crops, and thus invoke the aid and pity of some ancestral spirits. The mournful rite ends with a dance on a plot of ground overlooking the fields.(823) (M206) On the shore of Delagoa Bay there thrives a small brown beetle which is very destructive to the beans and maize. The Baronga call it _noonoo_. In December or January, when the insects begin to swarm, women are sent to collect them from the bean-stalks in shells. When they have done so, a twin girl is charged with the duty of throwing the insects into a neighbouring lake. Accompanied by a woman of mature years and carrying the beetles in a calabash, the girl goes on her mission without saying a word to any one. At her back marches the whole troop of women, their arms, waists, and heads covered with grass and holding in their hands branches of manioc with large leaves which they wave to and fro, while they chant the words, “_Noonoo_, go away! Leave our fields! _Noonoo_, go away! leave our fields!” The little girl throws her calabash with the beetles into the water without looking behind her, and thereupon the women bellow out obscene songs, which they never dare to utter except on this occasion and at the ceremony for making rain.(824)