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to Wakching; beliefs about villages of women, and regarding bees |
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12th. To Wakching, visiting the 3rd Assam Rifles outpost on the way. The Kongan Gaonburas met me on the road. Someone raised on the way the question of the location of the fabled village of women. The Konyak version says that the women keep hornets for their defence against their enemies and dogs to get them with children, human males being destroyed at birth. In the Angami version the hornets do the propogating though not in the normal manner, and the women are sufficiently amazonian to tear strangers to pieces themselves. They also told me that it is dangerous to take bees' nests because a bee can sometimes trace and identify the robber and takes his revenge by abstracting a bit of thatch from his roof as a result of which the man will inevitably die. |
