Part 14

Isolated and at the outskirts of every village is a house used by women when menstruating and for lying-in. Children are named as soon as born. The infant is given to the mother to suckle, while a wise woman rapidly recites the family ancestral names; the name pronounced at the instant the baby begins to feed is that by which it is thereafter known. Everybody has a double name, the father's being prefixed to that given at birth. Very often the two are the same. There is a special day for the first head-shaving. No hair is allowed on a male's scalp, except from a 4-in. circle at the back of the head, whence long locks hang down straight. Puberty is attained ceremoniously by boys. Girls simply change a fillet for a cotton cap when nature proclaims womanhood. Marriage is merely the purchase of a wife through intermediaries, accompanied by feasting. Divorce is often merely a sale or the sending away of a wife to slave for her parents in shame. Sexual morality is low. Public opinion applauds gallantry, and looks upon adultery as hospitality, provided it is not discovered by the husband. If found out, _in flagrante delicto_, there is a fiscal fine in cows. There is much collusion to get this penalty paid in poor households. Funeral rites are most elaborate, according to the rank and warrior fame of the deceased, if a male, and to the wealth and standing of the family, if a woman. Children are simply carried to the cemetery in a blanket, followed by a string of women lamenting. A really great man is mourned over for days with orations, dancing, wine-drinking and food distribution. Gun-firing gives notice of the procession. After two or three days the corpse is placed in the coffin at a secluded spot, and the observances are continued with a straw figure lashed upon a bed, to be danced about, lamented over, and harangued as before. During regular intervals for business and refreshment old women wail genealogies. A year later, with somewhat similar ritual, a wooden statue is inaugurated preliminary to erection on the roadside or in the village Valhalla. The dead are not buried, but deposited in great boxes collected in an assigned place. Finery is placed with the body, as well as vessels holding water and food. Several corpses may be heaped in one receptacle, which is, rarely, ornamented with flags; its lid is kept from warping by heavy stones. The wooden statues or effigies are at times sacrificed to when there is sickness, and at one of the many annual festivals food is set before them. Among the Presungal there are none of these images. Blood-feuds within a tribe do not exist. The slayer of his fellow, even by accident, has to pay a heavy compensation or else become an outcast. Several hamlets and at least one village are peopled by families who had thus been driven forth from the community. The stigma attaches itself to children and their marriage connexions. Its outward symbol is an inability to look in the face any of the dead person's family. This avoidance is ceremonial. In private and after dark all may be good friends after a decorous interval. The compensation is seldom paid, although payment carries with it much enhancement of family dignity. All the laws to punish theft, assault, adultery and other injury are based on a system of compensation whenever possible, and of enlisting the whole of the community in all acts of punishment. Kafirs have true conceptions of justice. There is no death penalty; a fighting male is too valuable a property of the whole tribe to be so wasted. War begins honourably with proper notice, as a rule, but the murder of an unsuspecting traveller may be the first intimation. Bullets or arrow-heads sent to a tribe or village is the correct announcement of hostilities. The slaying of a tribesman need not in all cases cause a war. Sometimes it may be avoided by the sinning tribe handing over a male to be killed by the injured relations. Ambush, early morning attacks by large numbers, and stealthy killing parties of two or three are the favourite tactics. Peace is made by the sacrifice of cows handed over by the weaker tribe to be offered up to a special god of the stronger. When both sides have shown equal force and address, the same number of animals are exchanged. Field-work falls exclusively to the women. It is poor. The ploughs are light and very shallow. A woman, who only looks as if she were yoked with the ox, keeps the beast in the furrows, while a second holds the handle. All the operations of agriculture are done primitively. Grazing and dairy-farming are the real trade of the Kafirs, the surplus produce being exchanged on the frontier or sold for Kabul rupees. Herders watch their charges fully armed against marauders.

_History._--The history of Kafiristan has always been of the floating legendary sort. At the present day there are men living in Chitral and on other parts of the Kafiristan frontier who are prepared to testify as eye-witnesses to marvels observed, and also heard, by them, not only in the more remote valleys but even in the Afghan borderland itself. It is not surprising therefore that the earlier records are to a great extent fairy tales of a more or less imaginative kind and chiefly of value to those interested in folk-lore. Sir Henry Yule, a scientific soldier, a profound geographer and a careful student, as the result of his researches thought that the present Kafiristan was part of that pagan country stretching between Kashmir and Kabul which medieval Asiatics referred to vaguely as _Bilaur_, a name to be found in Marco Polo as _Bolor_. The first distinct mention of the Kafirs as a separate people appears in the history of Timur. On his march to the invasion of India the people at Andarab appealed to Timur for help against the Kator and the Siah-Posh Kafirs. He responded and entered the country of those tribes through the upper part of the Panjhir valley. It was in deep winter weather and Timur had to be let down the snows by _glissade_ in a basket guided by ropes. A detachment of 10,000 horse which he speaks of as having been sent against the Siah-Posh to his left, presumably therefore to the north, met with disaster; but he himself claims to have been victorious. Nevertheless he seems quickly to have evacuated the impracticable mountain land, quitting the country at Khawak. He caused an inscription to be carved in the defiles of Kator to commemorate his invasion and to explain its route. Inside the Kafir country on the Najil or Alishang River there is a fort still called Timur's Castle, and in the Kalam fort there is said to be a stone engraved to record that as the farthest point of his advance. In the _Memoirs_ of Baber there is mention of the Kafirs raiding into Panjhir and of their taste for drinking, every man having a leathern wine-bottle slung round his neck. The _Ain-i-Akbari_ makes occasional mention of the Kafirs, probably on the authority of the famous _Memoirs_; it also contains a passage which may possibly have originated the widespread story that the Kafirs were descendants of the Greeks. Yule however believed that this passage did not refer to the Kafirs at all, but to the claims to descent from Alexander of the rulers in Swat before the time of the Yusufzai. Many of the princelings of the little Hindu-Kush states at the present day pride themselves on a similar origin, maintaining the founders of their race to be Alexander, "the two-horned," and a princess sent down miraculously from heaven to wed him.

Benedict Goes, travelling from Peshawar to Kabul in 1603, heard of a place called _Capperstam_, where no Mahommedan might enter on pain of death. Hindu traders were allowed to visit the country, but not the temples. Benedict Goes tasted the Kafir wine, and from all that he heard suspected that the Kafirs might be Christians. Nothing more is heard of the Kafirs until 1788, when Rennell's _Memoir of a Map of Hindostan_ was published. Twenty-six years later Elphinstone's _Caubal_ was published. During the British occupation of Kabul in 1839-1840 a deputation of Kafirs journeyed there to invite a visit to their country from the Christians whom they assumed to be their kindred. But the Afghans grew furiously jealous, and the deputation was sent coldly away.

After Sir George Robertson's sojourn in the country and the visit of several Kafirs to India with him in 1892 an increasing intimacy continued, especially with the people of the eastern valleys, until 1895, when by the terms of an agreement entered into between the government of India and the ruler of Afghanistan the whole of the Kafir territory came nominally under the sway of Kabul. The amir Abdur Rahman at once set about enforcing his authority, and the curtain, partially lifted, fell again heavily and in darkness. Nothing but rumours reached the outside world, rumours of successful invasions, of the wholesale deportation of boys to Kabul for instruction in the religion of Islam, of rebellions, of terrible repressions. Finally even rumour ceased. A powerful Asiatic ruler has the means of ensuring a silence which is absolute, and nothing is ever known from Kabul except what the amir wishes to be known. Probably larger numbers of the growing boys and young men of Kafiristan are fanatical Mahommedans, fanatical with the zeal of the recent convert, while the older people and the majority of the population cherish their ancient customs in secret and their degraded religion in fear and trembling--waiting dumbly for a sign.

See Sir G. S. Robertson, _Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush_ (London, 1896). (G. S. R.)

KAGERA, a river of east equatorial Africa, the most remote headstream of the Nile. The sources of its principal upper branch, the Nyavarongo, rise in the hill country immediately east of Lake Kivu. After a course of over 400 m. the Kagera enters Victoria Nyanza on its western shore in 0 deg. 58' S. It is navigable by steamers for 70 m. from its mouth, being obstructed by rapids above that point. The river was first heard of by J. H. Speke in 1858, and was first seen (by white men) by the same traveller (Jan. 16, 1862) on his journey to discover the Nile source. Speke was well aware that the Kagera was the chief river emptying into the Victoria Nyanza and in that sense _the_ headstream of the Nile. By him the stream was called "Kitangule," _kagera_ being given as equivalent to "river." The exploration of the Kagera has been largely the work of German travellers.

See NILE; also Speke's _Discovery of the Source of the Nile_ (Edinburgh, 1863); R. Kandt's _Caput Nili_ (Berlin, 1904); and map by P. Sprigade and M. Moisel in _Grosser deutscher Kolonialatlas_, No. 16 (Berlin, 1906).

KAHLUR, or BILASPUR, a native state of India, within the Punjab. It is one of the hill states that came under British protection after the first Sikh war in 1846. The Gurkhas had overrun the country in the early part of the 19th century, and expelled the raja, who was, however, reinstated by the British in 1815. The state occupies part of the basin of the Sutlej amid the lower slopes of the Himalaya. Area, 448 sq. m. Pop. (1901), 90,873; estimated gross revenue, L10,000; tribute, L530. The chief, whose title is raja, is a Chandel Rajput. The town of Bilaspur is situated on the left bank of the Sutlej, 1465 ft. above sea-level; pop. (1901), 3192.

KAHN, GUSTAVE (1859- ), French poet, was born at Metz on the 21st of December 1859. He was educated in Paris at the Ecole des Chartes and the Ecole des langues orientales, and began to contribute to obscure Parisian reviews. After four years spent in Africa he returned to Paris in 1885, and founded in 1886 a weekly review, _La Vogue_, in which many of his early poems appeared. In the autumn of the same year he founded, with Jean Moreas and Paul Adam, a short-lived periodical, _Le Symboliste_, in which they preached the nebulous poetic doctrine of Stephane Mallarme; and in 1888 he became one of the editors of the _Revue independante_. He contributed poetry and criticism to the French and Belgian reviews favourable to the extreme symbolists, and, with Catulle Mendes, he founded at the Odeon, the Theatre Antoine and the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt, matinees for the production of the plays of the younger poets. He claimed to be the earliest writer of the _vers libre_, and explained his methods and the history of the movement in a preface to his _Premiers poemes_ (1897). Later books are _Le Livre d'images_ (1897); _Les Fleurs de la passion_ (1900); some novels; and a valuable contribution to the history of modern French verse in _Symbolistes et decadents_ (1902).

KAHNIS, KARL FRIEDRICH AUGUST (1814-1888), German Lutheran theologian, was born at Greiz on the 22nd of December 1814. He studied at Halle, and in 1850 was appointed professor ordinarius at Leipzig. Ten years later he was made canon of Meissen. He retired in 1886, and died on the 20th of June 1888 at Leipzig. Kahnis was at first a neo-Lutheran, blessed by E. W. Hengstenberg and his pietistic friends. He then attached himself to the Old Lutheran party, interpreting Lutheranism in a broad and liberal spirit and showing some appreciation of rationalism. His _Lutherische Dogmatik, historisch-genetisch dargestellt_ (3 vols., 1861-1868; 2nd ed. in 2 vols., 1874-1875), by making concessions to modern criticism, by spiritualizing and adapting the old dogmas, by attacking the idea of an infallible canon of Scripture and the conventional theory of inspiration, by laying stress on the human side of Scripture and insisting on the progressive character of revelation, brought him into conflict with his former friends. A. W. Diekhoff, Franz Delitzsch (_Fur und wider Kahnis_, 1863) and Hengstenberg (_Evangelische Kirchenzeitung_, 1862) protested loudly against the heresy, and Kahnis replied to Hengstenberg in a vigorous pamphlet, _Zeugniss fur die Grundwahrheiten des Protestantismus gegen Dr Hengstenberg_ (1862).

Other works by Kahnis are _Lehre vom Abendmahl_ (1851), _Der innere Gang des deutschen Protestantismus seit Mitte des vorigen Jahrhunderts_ (1854; 3rd ed. in 2 vols., 1874; Eng. trans., 1856); _Christentum und Luthertum_ (1871); _Geschichte der deutschen Reformation_, vol. i. (1872); _Der Gang der Kirche in Lebensbildern_ (1881, &c.); and _Uber das Verhaltnis der alten Philosophie zum Christentum_ (1884).

K'AI-FENG FU, the capital of the province of Honan, China. It is situated in 34 deg. 52' N., 114 deg. 33' E., on a branch line of the Peking-Hankow railway, and forms also the district city of Siang-fu. A city on the present site was first built by Duke Chwang (774-700 B.C.) to mark off (_k'ai_) the boundary of his fief (_feng_); hence its name. It has, however, passed under several _aliases_ in Chinese history. During the Chow, Suy and T'ang dynasties (557-907) it was known as P'ien-chow. During the Wu-tai, or five dynasties (907-960), it was the Tung-king, or eastern capital. Under the Sung and Kin dynasties (960-1260) it was called P'ien-king. By the Yuan or Mongol dynasty (1260-1368) its name was again changed to P'ien-liang, and on the return of the Chinese to power with the establishment of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), its original name was restored. The city is situated at the point where the last spur of the Kuen-lun mountain system merges in the eastern plain, and a few miles south of the Hwang-ho. Its position, therefore, lays it Open to the destructive influences of this river. In 1642 it was totally destroyed by a flood caused by the dikes bursting, and on several prior and subsequent occasions it has suffered injury from the same cause. The city is large and imposing, with broad streets and handsome buildings, the most notable of which are a twelve-storeyed pagoda 600 ft. high, and a watch tower from which, at a height of 200 ft., the inhabitants are able to observe the approach of the yellow waters of the river in times of flood. The city wall forms a substantial protection and is pierced by five gates. The whole neighbourhood, which is the site of one of the earliest settlements of the Chinese in China, is full of historical associations, and it was in this city that the Jews who entered China in A.D. 1163 first established a colony. For many centuries these people held themselves aloof from the natives, and practised the rites of their religion in a temple built and supported by themselves. At last, however, they fell upon evil times, and in 1851, out of the seventy families which constituted the original colony, only seven remained. For fifty years no rabbi had ministered to the wants of this remnant. In 1853 the city was attacked by the T'ai-p'ing rebels, and, though at the first assault its defenders successfully resisted the enemy, it was subsequently taken. The captors looted and partially destroyed the town. It has now little commerce, but contains several schools on Western lines--including a government college opened in 1902, and a military school near the railway station. A mint was established in 1905, and there is a district branch of the imperial post. The population--largely Mahommedan--was estimated (1908) at 200,000. Jews numbered about 400.

KAILAS, a mountain in Tibet. It is the highest peak of the range of mountains lying to the north of Lake Manasorawar, with an altitude of over 22,000 ft. It is famous in Sanskrit literature as Siva's paradise, and is a favourite place of pilgrimage with Hindus, who regard it as the most sacred spot on earth. A track encircles the base of the mountain, and it takes the pilgrim three weeks to complete the round, prostrating himself all the way.

KAIN, the name of a sub-province and of a town of Khorasan, Persia. The sub-province extends about 300 m. N. to S., from Khaf to Seistan, and about 150 m. W. to E., from the hills of Tun to the Afghan frontier, comprising the whole of south-western Khorasan. It is very hilly, but contains many wide plains and fertile villages at a mean elevation of 4000 ft. It has a population of about 150,000, rears great numbers of camels and produces much grain, saffron, wool, silk and opium. The chief manufactures are felts and other woollen fabrics, principally carpets, which have a world-wide reputation. The best Kaini carpets are made at Darakhsh, a village in the Zirkuh district and 50 m. N.E. of Birjend. It is divided into eleven administrative divisions:--Shahabad (with the capital Birjend), Naharjan, Alghur, Tabas sunni Khaneh, Zirkuh Shakhan, Kain, Nimbuluk, Nehbandan, Khusf, Arab Khaneh or Momenabad.

The town of Kain, the capital of the sub-province until 1740, when it was supplanted by Birjend, is situated 65 m. N. of Birjend on the eastern side of a broad valley, stretching from N. to S., at the base of the mountain Abuzar, in 33 deg. 42' N. and 59 deg. 8' E., and at an elevation of 4500 ft. Its population is barely 5000. It is surrounded by a mud wall and bastions, and near it, on a hill rising 500 ft. above the plain, are the ruins of an ancient castle which, together with the old town, was destroyed either by Shah Rukh (1404-1447), a son, or by Baysunkur (d. 1433), a grandson of Timur (Tamerlane), who afterwards built a new town. After a time the Uzbegs took possession and held the town until Shah Abbas I. (1587-1629) expelled them. In the 18th century it fell under the sway of the Afghans and remained a dependency of Herat until 1851. A large number of windmills are at work outside the town. The great mosque, now in a ruinous state, was built A.H. 796 (A.D. 1394) by Karen b. Jamshid and repaired by Yusof Dowlatyar.

KAIRA, or KHEDA, a town and district of British India, in the northern division of Bombay. The town is 20 m. S.W. of Ahmedabad and 7 m. from Mehmadabad railway station. Pop. (1901), 10,392. Its antiquity is proved by the evidence of copperplate grants to have been known as early as the 5th century. Early in the 18th century it passed to the Babi family, with whom it remained till 1763, when it was taken by the Mahrattas; it was finally handed over to the British in 1803. It was a large military station till 1830, when the cantonment was removed to Deesa.

The DISTRICT OF KAIRA has an area of 1595 sq. m.; pop. (1901), 716,332, showing a decrease of 18% in the decade, due to the results of famine. Except a small corner of hilly ground near its northern boundary and in the south-east and south, where the land along the Mahi is furrowed into deep ravines, the district forms one unbroken plain, sloping gently towards the south-west. The north and north-east portions are dotted with patches of rich rice-land, broken by untilled tracts of low brushwood. The centre of the district is very fertile and highly cultivated; the luxuriant fields are surrounded by high hedges, and the whole country is clothed with clusters of shapely trees. To the west this belt of rich vegetation passes into a bare though well-cultivated tract of rice-land, growing more barren and open till it reaches the maritime belt, whitened by a salt-like crust, along the Gulf of Cambay. The chief rivers are the Mahi on the south-east and south, and the Sabarmati on the western boundary. The Mahi, owing to its deeply cut bed and sandbanks, is impracticable for either navigation or irrigation; but the waters of the Sabarmati are largely utilized for the latter purpose. A smaller stream, the Khari, also waters a considerable area by means of canals and sluices. The principal crops are cotton, millets, rice and pulse; the industries are calico-printing, dyeing, and the manufacture of soap and glass. The chief centre of trade is Nadiad, on the railway, with a cotton-mill. A special article of export is _ghi_, or clarified butter. The Bombay & Baroda railway runs through the district. The famine of 1899-1900 was felt more severely here than in any other part of the province, the loss of cattle being specially heavy.

KAIRAWAN (KEROUAN), the "sacred" city of Tunisia, 36 m. S. by W. by rail from Susa, and about 80 m. due S. from the capital. Kairawan is built in an open plain a little west of a stream which flows south to the Sidi-el-Hani lake. Of the luxuriant gardens and olive groves mentioned in the early Arabic accounts of the place hardly a remnant is left. Kairawan, in shape an irregular oblong, is surrounded by a crenellated brick wall with towers and bastions and five gates. The city, however, spreads beyond the walls, chiefly to the south and west. Some of the finest treasures of Saracenic art in Tunisia are in Kairawan; but the city suffered greatly from the vulgarization which followed the Turkish conquest, and also from the blundering attempts of the French to restore buildings falling into ruin. The streets have been paved and planted with trees, but the town retains much of its Oriental aspect. The houses are built round a central courtyard, and present nothing but bare walls to the street. The chief buildings are the mosques, which are open to Christians, Kairawan being the only town in Tunisia where this privilege is granted.