AN UNCANNY TOWNSHIP.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2350, 3 November 1921, Page 4

AN UNCANNY TOWNSHIP.

TALES OF BURMA MAGIC,

iVIZARDS AND NECROMANCERS

The town of- Kali Thaungtot, on the Chichvin River, in Lower Burma, must be an uncanny—and quite un-pleasant-place; It is inhabited solely by wizards and necromancers, according to Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, F.R.G.S., who, in an article in the Occult Review on “The Occult Lore of Burma,” tells some weird narratives regarding the place.

Though the town is much frequented by pilgrims who betake themselves to it to have the effects of bewitchment neutralised, few Europeans are able to penetrate to it, and if they did they would probably not be rewarded for the long journey by the unveiling of the marvel.

“But in the ease of an Indian it is very different, and several of my countrymen, writes Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, have seen things in Kali Thaungtot, which knowing the reputation of the place, scarcely surprised them.

“One, a trader, who was in the country buying up that wonderful brasswork which sells so well in Europe, and even in Calcutta and Bombay, insists upon it that he saw a fowl taken out of a bag, its head cut off, and then put on again, after which -the bird was put on the ground and walked away. A soldier friend has assured me that he saw the same thing done in China. Another traveller in Burma has.averred that he saw a weza (necromancer) expand himself by some means to the size of a small baloo'n, .collapse and disappear to the sound of an explosion. “A terrible silence is said to brood over the village by day. But the night is made hideous with the sound of gongs and the wild chanting of the wizards invoking the spiiits of the dead to appear. “The surroundings are swampy and deserted, and my informant was told by his bearers, who would on no account go nearer the town than within the distance of a mile, that the marshes which almost encircle it are the abode of beings neither human nor supernatural, but possessing the characteristics of both man and demon. These, they asserted, were shaggy of body, green-eyed, and terrible in aspect. “When my friend advanced, accompanied only by a couple of his personal servants, they bade him farewell as if lie were a dofiined man. In trussing through the woods he was struck by the utter absence of animal or bird life, and could not at all account for the extraordinary noises he heard coining from the deeper parts of the forest. “These,” he said, “resembled the sounds a man might make had lie never learnt to speak —such grotesque noises as the dumb sometimes make when in terror or mortal pain. “Women who have been rubbed with oil enchanted by a wizard are said to lose their reason and to flee away into the woods. They retain their human shape for seven days, and if within that period a man shall submit himself to the same process of being anointed with the magic ointment, and shall follow the woman to the woods and strike her on the head with a heavy bar, >he shall recover her reason and return home cured. If, however, this is not done at the end of the seven days, she is transformed into a tigress.” -