Part 7 (1/2)

Lunatics, from their point of view, are only persons spirit-possessed.

Gradually old Bootha, clothed as usual, came back about the place.

Strange stories came through the house blacks to me of old Bootha. She was very ill for a long time, then suddenly she recovered; not only recovered but seemed rejuvenated. We heard of wonderful cures she made; how she always consulted the spirits about any illness; how there were said to be spirits in some of her dogs; how she was now a rainmaker and, in fact, a fully fledged witch.

I was curious to see some of these wonders, so used to get the old woman to come up when any one was ill, consult her, and generally make much of her. There is no doubt she could diagnose a case well enough.

Matah suffered a good deal with a constant pain in one knee, he was quite lame from it. He showed it to Bootha one day. She sang a song to her spirits, then said:

'Too muchee water there; you steam him, put him on hot rag; you drink plenty cold water, all lite dat go.'

As it happened a medical man was pa.s.sing a few days afterwards with an insurance agent. Matah consulted him.

'Hum! Yes, yes. Hot fomentations to the place affected, poultices, a cooling draught. There's a stoppage of fluid at the knee-joint which must be dispersed.'

I thought Bootha ought to have been called in consultation.

A girl I had staying with me was taken suddenly and, to us, unaccountably ill. She was just able to get out of her room into the drawing-room, where she would lie back on the cus.h.i.+ons of a lounge looking dreadfully limp and utterly washed out. Hearing of her illness old Bootha came up. I thought it might amuse Adelaide to see an old witch; she agreed, so I brought her in.

Bootha went straight up to the sick girl, expressed a few sympathetic sentences, then she said she would ask the spirits what had made Adelaide ill and what would cure her.

She moved my furniture until she left the centre of the room clear; she squatted down, and hanging her head began muttering in an unintelligible dialect. Presently her voice ceased and we heard from beside her a most peculiar whistling sort of voice, to which she responded, evidently interrogating. Again the whistling voice from further away. Bootha then told me she had asked a dead black fellow, Big Joe, to tell her what she wanted to know; but he could not, so now she was going to ask her dead granddaughter. Again she said a sort of incantation, and again, after a while, came the whistling voice reply--this time from another direction, not quite so loud. The same sort of thing was gone through with the same result.

Then Bootha said she would ask Guadgee, a black girl who had been one of my first favourites in the camp, and who had died a few years previously.

The whistling voice came from a third direction, though all the time I could see Bootha's lips moving.

Guadgee answered all she was asked. She said Adelaide was made ill because she had offended the spirits by bathing in the creek under the shade of a Minggah, or spirit-tree, a place tabooed to all but wirreenuns, or such as hold communion with spirits.

Of course, according to the blacks, to disturb a shadow is to hurt the original.

In this Minggah, Guadgee said, were swarms of bees invisible to all but wirreenuns, and they are ready always to resent any insult to the Minggah or its shadow. These spirit-bees had entered Adelaide and secreted some wax on her liver; their bites, Guadgee said, were on her back.

Well, that can't be it, I said, I for you never did bathe in the shade of a Minggah; for, going as you always do with the house-girls, you are bound to be kept from such sacrilege; they would never dare such desecration.'

'Which is their Minggah? Is it a big Coolabah between the Bend and the garden?'

'Yes.'

'Then I did bathe there the last time I went down. I was up too late to go with the Black-but-Comelys, and as the sun was hot I went further round the point and bathed in the shade. And the bee-bites must be those horribly irritating pimples I have across my back.'

The cause of illness settled to her satisfaction, Bootha asked how to cure it. The patient was to drink nothing hot nor heating but as much cold water as she liked, especially a long drink before going to bed.

Guadgee said she would come in the night when the patient was asleep and take the wax from her liver; she would sleep well and wake better in the morning.

Bootha got up then, came over to the patient, took her hand, rubbed it round the wrist several times, muttering an incantation; then saying she would see her again next day, off she went, taking, she told us, all the spirits away inside her, whence at desire they could be returned to such Minggah in their own Noorunbah, or hereditary hunting-grounds, as wirreenuns had placed them in, or to roam at their pleasure when not required by those in authority over spirits. Our old spiritualist denies us freedom even in the after-life she promises us.

Adelaide slept that night, looked a better colour the next morning, and rapidly recovered.

We think old Bootha must be a good physician and a ventriloquist, only I believe it is said ventriloquists cannot live long, and Bootha is now over eighty.