“I am to bring wood without tying it,
    I am to bring wood without tying it,
    How far have my brothers gone to trade?”

and as she cried a python came out and asked what was the matter, and when it heard, it told her not to cry and said that it would act as a rope to bind up the sticks; so it stretched itself out and she laid the sticks on it and then it coiled itself round them and she carried the bundle home.

As the sisters-in-law had been baffled thus, they resolved on another plan and proposed that they should all go and gather sticks in the jungle; and on the way they came to a machunda tree in full flower and they wanted to pick some of the flowers.  The wicked sisters-in-law at first began to climb the tree, but they pretended that they could not and kept slipping down; then they hoisted their sister-in-law into the branches and told her to throw down the flowers to them.  But while she was in the tree, they tied thorns round the trunk so that she could not descend and then left her to starve.  After she had been in the tree a long time, her brothers passed that way on their return journey, and sat down under the tree to rest; the girl was too weak to speak but she cried and her tears fell on the back of her eldest brother, and he looked up and saw her; then they rescued her and revived her and listened to her story; and they were very angry and vowed to have revenge.  So they gave their sister some needles and put her in a sack and put the sack on one of the pack-bullocks.  And when they got home, they took the sack off gently and told their wives to carry it carefully inside the house, and on no account to put it down.  But when the wives took it up, the girl inside pricked them with the needles so that they screamed and let the sack fall.  Their husbands scolded them and made them take it up again, and they had to carry it in, though they were pricked till the blood ran down.  Then the brothers enquired about all that had happened in their absence, and at last asked after their sister, and their wives said that she had gone to the jungle with some friends to get firewood.  But the brothers turned on them and told how they had found her in the machunda tree and had brought her home in the sack, and their wives were dumbfounded.  Then the brothers said that they had made a vow to dig a well and consecrate it; so they set to work to dig a well two fathoms across and three fathoms deep; and when they reached water, they fixed a day for the consecration; and they told their wives to put on their best clothes and do the cumaura (betrothal) ceremony at the well.  So the wives went to the well, escorted by drummers, and as they stood in a row round the well, each man pushed his own wife into it and then they covered the well with a wooden grating and kept them in it for a whole year and at the end of the year they pulled them out again.

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