66 THE LUSHEI CLANS CHAP.

spirits are uniformly bad, and all the troubles and ills of life are
attributed to them, and the sacrifices described in the next part
are supposed to appease them.

The following account of the doings of one of these Huai was
given me by Suakhnuna, one of the most intelligent of the
-Lushei chiefs:—

" A Ram-huai named Chongpuithanga used to live near the
ford over the Sonai. He said he was the servant of the King of
the Huai and was always on the look out for men along the
banks of the river. He spoke through a girl called Ziki, who
was often ill, and used to go into trances. He demanded a pig
and professed to have caused the deaths of ten persons of the
village." The following is another story which the teller fully
believed. " About six years ago Hminga, of Lalbuta's village,
was looking at a ngoi (fishing weir) and saw some Ram-huai.
These wore the chawndawl (headdress worn by slayers of men),
and round these were strings of babies' skulls. On his return
home he got very ill, and all his family kept on asking him what
was the matter, but when he was going to tell them the Ram-
huai would seize him by the throat so that he could not tell
them. If he managed to say a few words he got a pain in the
head. He did not die, but recovered/' Again, " A woman of
Lalbuta's village went out of her house at night for purposes
of nature. Her name was Mangami; she was enceinte. The
Huai of the Tuitlin precipice caught her, and forced out the
immature child and then carried her off down the rocks. The
young men of the village went to search for her and found her
naked in the jungle at the foot cf the precipice, where the
Ram-huai had left her. She knew nothing about it. She
recovered."

The following story gives rather a different view of the
Huai:—" A man called Dailova, who may be alive now, did not
know that it was time for him to perform his Sakhua sacrifice.
He and his son went down to fetch ' dhan' from the jhum house,
and slept there among the straw; in the night the boy, feeling
cold, went into the jhum house and slept among the paddy, but
Dailova covered himself up in the straw and kept warm.
Towards morning two Huais came along, one of whom was called
Lianthawnga, and the other, Ram-huai, called to him, * Where