In None Of The African Stories Is There Given Anything Like
The Importance To Dreams That There Is Given To
Attempts to account
for accidents and death; and surely it must have been more
impressive and important to a man
To have got his leg or arm snapped
off by a crocodile in the river, or by a shark in the surf, or to
have got half killed, or have seen a friend killed by a falling tree
in the forest in the day time, than to have experienced the most
wonderful of dreams. He sees that however terrific his dream-
experiences may have been, he was not much the worse for them. Not
so in the other case, a limb gone or a life gone is more impressive,
and more necessary to account for.
No trace of sun-worship have I ever found. The firmament is, I
believe, always the great indifferent and neglected god, the Nyan
Kupon of the Tschwi, and the Anzambe, Nzam, etc., of the Bantu
races. The African thinks this god has great power if he would only
exert it, and when things go very badly with him, when the river
rises higher than usual and sweeps away his home and his
plantations; when the smallpox stalks through the land, and day and
night the corpses float down the river past him, and he finds them
jammed among his canoes that are tied to the beach, and choking up
his fish traps; and then when at last the death-wail over its
victims goes up night and day from his own village, he will rise up
and call upon this great god in a terror maddened by despair, that
he may hear and restrain the evil workings of these lesser devils;
but he evidently finds, as Peer Gynt says, "Nein, er hort nicht.
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