The natives say, ‘A man complains, and the spirits can hear him, but they can have no intercourse with man except in dreams, and in the silent care which they can exercise, having power to lead men, and to watch over them with favour, or when a man is going into danger to turn him back.’ If more explicit communication is needed, they inspire some person, and make him rave (_bwebweta_); his words are not directly intelligible, but some one is found to interpret them; ‘one man is laid hold of by the spirits that he may tell all people and they may hear.’ The person thus inspired may be a man or a woman—among the Yaos perhaps more frequently the latter. The dead _may_ manifest themselves in the shape of animals; but this does not happen so often as among the Zulus, who quite expect their deceased relatives to come back, like Cadmus and Harmonia, as ‘bright and aged snakes,’ and are very glad to see them when they do. The Yao theory seems to be that none of the departed will do this, unless they mean to be nasty. ‘If a dead man wants to frighten his wife, he may persist in coming as a serpent. The only remedy for this is to kill the serpent’—which no Zulu in his senses would dream of doing. However, the accidental killing of ‘a serpent belonging to a spirit’ seems to demand some sort of apology. ‘A great hunter generally takes the form of a lion or a leopard; and all witches seem to like the form of a hyena.’ But witches often turn into hyenas without dying first—which belongs to another part of the subject. The Makanga, in the angle between the Shiré and Zambezi, refrain from killing lions, believing that the spirits of dead chiefs enter into them. There seems to be some difference of opinion with regard to the degree to which the spirits will make communications in dreams. An old Nyanja chief said to Livingstone, ‘Sometimes the dead do come back, and appear to us in dreams; but they never speak nor tell us where they have gone, nor how they fare.’ On the other hand, as we have seen, communications in dreams are expected as a regular thing. The Anyanja and Makololo (says Mr. Macdonald) were inclined to lay more stress on dreams than on the oracle of the _ufa_ cone. They argued that, if you put the flour down carefully enough, it will always assume the proper pyramidal shape, and if you cover it with an upturned pot overnight (the usual practice), it will keep it—unless the rats overturn the pot. Perhaps this was due to the rationalising influence of the Makololo, who had been longer in contact with white men, and (like other natives in like case) were always burning to assert the superiority which this gave them.