64 THE NON-ARAB RACES OF DARFUR I. 4. v.

making ceremonies are held, a day's journey away, at Gebel Abu Nukta. It also is called Telli (Delli). We shall see that elsewhere in Darfur analogous ceremonies are held with the object of ensuring good rains, and in every case the medium is an old woman, and offerings are made at some particular stone or tree; but in the case of Midob there is, so far as I could discover, no suggestion of the usual serpent or other demon having its lair beneath.

The three main sections into which the people of Midob are divided are the Urti (in the northern hills), the Torti (or Dorti), and the Shelkota (in the southern hills), but there are also certain well-defined subdivisions such as the Ordarti, the Genana—who are reckoned to have a strong Arab strain and whose name is familiar from the "nisbas" {q.v. in Part IV)—the Turkeddi, the Usutti and the Kageddi. All alike (the Genana excepted) claim to be Mahass from Dongola but they preserve no written record nor oral tradition as to the time at which they settled at Midob nor as to the circumstances of their migration. They call themselves Tiddi.

The old burial grounds at Midob are invariably at the foot of the hills and the sites are marked by rough cairns of stone. Exactly similar cairns occur between Midob and the Wadi el Melik, on the Wadi el Melik, at Kaga and Katul, on the Wadi el Mukaddam, in the hills immediately west of Omdurman and in the hills between the Blue Nile and Abu Delayk.

VI Berti. South of the Midob hills, in eastern Darfur, live the Berti, a large tribe of mixed origin. To the Fur they are known as KuRMU, to the Birked as Sulgu, to the Midob people as Bayti. They call themselves Sigato. Their upper classes put forward shadowy claims to be related to the Ga'aliin of the Nile valley and to the HowARA by descent and to the Dar Hamid group of Kordofan by intermarriage, but in appearance they are all alike negroid.

The true home of the Berti is in the Tagabo hills between Midob and el Fasher, but in recent years, owing partly to the oppressiveness of the Fur Sultan's rule and partly to the local failure of the crops, large numbers of them have settled to the south-east in Gebel el Hilla and Tawaysha districts, where there used to be only insignificant colonies of Berti, and in western Kordofan. They are entirely sedentary and are rightly described by el Tunisi as a mild and ' Compare Ibn Selfm's record of the vogue of a sacred stone in connection with rainmaking in the S6ba (Gezfra) region in the tenth century (see Part II, Chap. 2).

" Tiddi" in the Berti language means "white"—probably a mere coincidence.

3 See Part III, Chap. 8.

" See Voy. Darjour, pp. 128, 133, 136, 297.