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upon opposite shores of the inland sea. Ajor tried to explain the matter to me,
though it was apparent that she could not conceive how so natural a condition
should demand explanation. She told me that among the Galus there were a few
babies, that she had once been a baby but that most of her people "came up," as
he put it, "cor sva jo," or literally, "from the beginning"; and as they all did when
they used that phrase, she would wave a broad gesture toward the south.
"
For long," she explained, leaning very close to me and whispering the words into
my ear while she cast apprehensive glances about and mostly skyward, "for long
my mother kept me hidden lest the Wieroo, passing through the air by night,
should come and take me away to Oo-oh." And the child shuddered as she voiced
the word. I tried to get her to tell me more; but her terror was so real when she
spoke of the Wieroo and the land of Oo-oh where they dwell that I at last desisted,
though I did learn that the Wieroo carried off only female babes and occasionally
women of the Galus who had "come up from the beginning." It was all very
mysterious and unfathomable, but I got the idea that the Wieroo were creatures
of imagination--the demons or gods of her race, omniscient and omnipresent.
This led me to assume that the Galus had a religious sense, and further
questioning brought out the fact that such was the case. Ajor spoke in tones of
reverence of Luata, the god of heat and life. The word is derived from two others:
Lua, meaning sun, and ata, meaning variously eggs, life, young, and
reproduction. She told me that they worshiped Luata in several forms, as fire,
the sun, eggs and other material objects which suggested heat and reproduction.
I had noticed that whenever I built a fire, Ajor outlined in the air before her with a
forefinger an isosceles triangle, and that she did the same in the morning when
she first viewed the sun. At first I had not connected her act with anything in
particular, but after we learned to converse and she had explained a little of her
religious superstitions, I realized that she was making the sign of the triangle as a
Roman Catholic makes the sign of the cross. Always the short side of the triangle
was uppermost. As she explained all this to me, she pointed to the decorations
on her golden armlets, upon the knob of her dagger-hilt and upon the band
which encircled her right leg above the knee--always was the design partly made
up of isosceles triangles, and when she explained the significance of this
particular geometric figure, I at once grasped its appropriateness.
We were now in the country of the Band-lu, the spearmen of Caspak. Bowen had
remarked in his narrative that these people were analogous to the so-called Cro-
Magnon race of the Upper Paleolithic, and I was therefore very anxious to see
them. Nor was I to be disappointed; I saw them, all right! We had left the Sto-lu
country and literally fought our way through cordons of wild beasts for two days
when we decided to make camp a little earlier than usual, owing to the fact that
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