(M246) “Originally this ghost was a man, a village elder (_jumbe_) of Ukami. He was a great sorcerer. One day people wished to conquer him, but they could do him no harm, for neither lead nor sword nor arrow could pierce his body. But he lived at strife with his wife. She said to his enemies, ‘If you would kill my husband, I will tell you how it can be done.’ They asked her, ‘How can it be done?’ She answered, ‘My husband is a great sorcerer; you all know that.’ They answered, ‘That is true.’ Then she said further, ‘If you would kill him so that he dies on the spot, seek a stalk of a gourd and smite him with it; then he will die at once, for that has always been to him a forbidden thing.’(768) They sought the stalk of a gourd, and when they smote him with it, he died at once without so much as setting one foot from the spot. But of him and his departure there was nothing more to be seen, for suddenly a great storm blew, and no man knew whither he had gone. The storm is said to have carried him to that cave which is still there to this day. After some days people saw in the cave his weapons, clothes, and turban lying, and they brought word to the folk in the town, ‘We have seen the clothes of the elder in the cave, but of himself we have perceived nothing.’ The folk went thither to look about, and they found that it was so. So the news of this ghost spread, all the more because people had seen the marvel that a man died and nobody knew where he had gone. The wonderful thing in this wood is that the spirits dwell in the midst of the wood and that everywhere a bright white sand lies on the ground, as if people had gone thither for the purpose of keeping everything clean. On many days they hear a drumming and shouts of joy in this wood, as if a marriage feast were being held there. That is the report about the ghost of Kolelo.(769) All village elders, who dwell in the interior, see in this ghost the greatest ghost of all. All the chiefs (_mwene_) and headmen (_pazi_) and the village elders (_jumben_) of the clan Kingaru(770) respect that ghost.”(771) (M247) Miss Alice Werner, who kindly called my attention to this and the following cases of African Balders, tells me that this worshipful ghost in the cave appears to have been in his time a real man. Again, she was assured by some natives that “Chikumbu, a Yao chief, who at one time gave the Administration some trouble, was invulnerable by shot or steel; the only thing that could kill him—since he had not been fortified against it by the proper medicine—was a sharp splinter of bamboo. This reminds one of Balder and the mistletoe.”(772) Again, a Nyanja chief named Chibisa, who was a great man in this part of Africa when Livingstone travelled in it,(773) “stood firm upon his ant-heap, while his men fell round him, shouting his war-song, until one who knew the secret of a sand-bullet brought him down.”(774)