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 circum-

stances 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.