CLOUD GAZING AND TEA-STAINING AT PILLOW LAKE.
The tribes that live around Pillow Lake believe that the spirits of their ancestors dwell on the mountains with the gods and are occasionally sent down to the plains, in the form of clouds, to deliver messages.
Local witch doctors are able to interpret these signs as they pass overhead. When a favourable cloud appears reflected in the Lake, the villagers rush down to the water edge, where the tea-plants grow, with their clothing and bed linen.
The linen is screwed-up into a ball and soaked in the tea-clouds. The cloth is subsequently removed from the lake, spread out on the bank and left to dry in the sun. Ridges and folds in the sheets mean that the tea does not stain the material evenly and an abstract pattern emerges. The belief is that the image of the cloud can be projected onto the cloth, albeit in a corrupted form, and the favourable omen will pass into the material.
James Young was unaware of this ritual, noting only that natives occasionally dyed clothing in the lake. In fact it was only after the Second World War when missionaries built a hospital near to the villages that the true nature of the ceremony was brought to light.
One of the nurses who worked at the hospital complained that the villagers would often bring filthy looking sheets with them, which they would demand be placed on the bed that was going to house their sick relative. The Reverend Graham Hislop, a distant relation to Nagpor mission worker, Stephen Hislop, studied the culture and traditions of these tribes. Once he understood the significance of the tea-cloth and the importance of cloud-gazing in Pillow Lake (He humorously described the ceremony as divine smoke signals followed by primitive photography) he allowed the sick villagers to use as their tea-stained sheets as bed linen, noting that in many cases this seemed to speed recovery.
He was even a piece of cloth, by a grateful family, which he was told would protect him from fever. Unfortunately, this was of little use to a devout Christian such as Graham Hislop. He died of Dengue fever in Little Aden and was buried in the British Cemetery, near Steamer Point.
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