evening walks unpopular, for there are places in every bush path where, if you meet him, you must brush against him—places where the wet season's rains have made the path a narrow ditch, with clay incurved walls above your head—places where the path turns sharply round a corner—places where it runs between rock walls. Such being the case, the risk of rubbing against his rotting side is held to be so great that it is best avoided by staying at home in the village with your wives and families, and playing the tom-tom or the orchid-fibre-stringed harp, or, if you are a bachelor, sitting in the village club-house listening to the old ones talking like retired Colonels. Yet however this may be, I should hesitate to call this half-rotten individual "a material object." Sometimes we had merry laughs after these meetings, for he was only So-and-so from the village—it was not him. Sometimes we had cold chills down the back, for we lost sight of him; under our eyes he went and he left no ash.
Take again Mbuiri of the Mpongwe, who comes in the form usually of a man; or Nkala, who comes as a crab; or the great Nzambi of the Fjort—they leave no ash—and so on. This subject of apparition-forms is a very interesting one, and requires more investigation. For such gods as Nzambi Mpungu do not appear to human beings on earth at all, except in tempest and pestilence. The great gods next in order leave no ash. The witch, if he or she be destroyed, does leave ash, and the ordinary middle and lower class spirits leave the thing they have been in, so unaltered by their use of it that no one but a witch doctor can tell whether or no it has been possessed by a spirit.
You see therefore Fetish is in a way complex and cannot
