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^i^^ SOMALI COAST. 131
ignorant people in a state of terror. If some of them in trading with some
foreign ship have a quarrel, the sorcerers pronounce a charm over the ship,
so that it can neither go forward nor backward, and they only release the ship
when it has settled the dispute. The government has formally forbidden this
5 practice^.
Every year countless numbers of birds of passage (^ -^) alight in
the desert parts of this country. When the sun rises, they suddenly disappear,
so that one cannot find a trace of them. The people catch them with nets,
and eat them; they are remarkably savoury. They are in season till the end
10 of spring, but, as soon as summer comes, they disappear, to come back the
following year.
When one of the inhabitants dies, and they are about to bury him in
his coffin, his kinsfolk from near and far come to condole. Each person,
flourishing a sword in his hand, goes in and asks the mourners the cause of
15 the person's death. «If he was killed by the hand of man, each one says, we
will revenge him on the murderer with these swords». Should the mourners
reply that he was not killed by any one, but that he came to his end by the
will of Heaven, they throw away their swords and break into violent wailing.
Every year there are driven on the coast a great many dead fish
20 measuring two hundred feet in length and twenty feet through the body. The
people do not eat the flesh of these fish, but they cut out their brains, marrow,
and eyes, from which they get oil, often as much as three hundred odd tong (from
a single fish). They mix this oil with lime to caulk their boats, and use it also
in lamps. The poor people use the ribs of these fish to make rafters, the
25 backbones for door leaves, and they cut off vertebrae to make mortars with *.
There is a mountain (or island, |JL() in this country M'hich forms the
boundary of Pi-p'a-lo. It is four thousand U around it — for the most part
uninhabited. Dragon's-blood is procured from this mountain, also aloes (^
-Qr), and from the waters (around it) tortoise-shell and ambergris.
30 It is not known whence ambergris comes; it suddenly appears in lumps
of from three to five or ten catties in weight, driven on the shore by the
wind. The people of the country make liaste to divide it up, or ships run
across it at sea and fish it up ^.
Notes.
35 1) Chung-H, as a name of a country, does not occur in any other Chinese writer hefore
or after Chau Ju-kua. There is no douht, however, that the region to which it is applied is the
Somali coast, but it included the island of Socotra. The name itself is not identified; it seems to
point to the word Zing, Zang or Zenj, for the mediaeval Arab writers refer to this region as the
wcountry of the Blacksa (Zanj). Ibn Batuta, II, 180 says, the country of the Blacks extended
9*
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