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"A fever called No-ma-dzï works great havoc among the Nou-su every year, and the people are very much afraid of it. No person will stay by the sick-bed to nurse the unfortunate victim. Instead, food and water are placed by his bedside and, covered with his quilt, he is left at the mercy of the disease.
Nou-su women, their feet unbound, with high foreheads and well-cut features, with fiery eyes set in not unkindly faces, tall and healthy, would be considered handsome women in any country in Europe. They rarely intermarry with other tribes.
The men have adopted Chinese dress, but the women, in most cases, retain their tribal costume with its large turban-like head-dress, its plaited skirt and intricately embroidered coat. All this is made by hand, and the choicest years of maidenhood are occupied in preparing the clothes for the wedding-day. "The Nou-su, it would seem, used not to beg a wife, but rather obtained her by main force.
The Nou-su are a very fine, tall race, with comparatively fair complexions, suggesting a mixture of Mongolian with some other straight-featured people. Of their origin, however, little can be vouched for, and with it we will have nothing to do here.
The Pehmo then proceeds with his incantation, muttering: 'From now, henceforth and for ever will the evil spirits keep away from this house. "Most Nou-su at the present time observe the New Year festival on the same date and with the same customs as the Chinese.
He has a couplet which runs: 'If you eat raw food, you become a warrior; if you eat it cooked, you suffer hunger. No chairs or tables are found in a genuine Nou-su house. The food is served up in a large bowl placed on the floor. The family sit around, and each one helps himself with a large wooden spoon.
That portion of the tribe which migrated across the Yangtze, secure among the mountains, has never ceased to harass the Chinese, who now dwell on land which the Nou-su themselves once tilled, or at least inhabited; but they have been driven into remoter districts, and are only found away from the highways of Chinese travel.
Said a Nou-su youth to me years ago, 'The thought of our friends' bodies either turning to corruption or being eaten by wild beasts is distasteful to us, and therefore we burn our dead. The corpse is burnt with wood, and during the cremation the mourners arrange themselves around the fire and chant and dance. The ashes are buried, and the ground leveled.
Even here, however, light is beginning to shine, for some adherents of the Christian religion have changed their slaves into tenants, thus showing the way to the ultimate solution of this difficult problem. "The life in a Nou-su household is not very complex. The cattle are driven out early in the morning, as soon as the sun has risen.
He will be one of the surviving specimens of a race of people, the Nou-su, whose forgotten historical records would do much to clear up the doubt attaching to Indo-China and Tibet-Burma ethnology.
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