PEOPLE WHO BECOME INVISIBLE.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXII, Issue 153, 29 June 1901, Page 5 (Supplement)

PEOPLE WHO BECOME INVISIBLE.

"A marvellously clever device, says "The New Penny Magazine," practised by tne thieves of lower Bombay is that used toy the Mooches in throwing pursuers off their track. The Mooches come down In gangs from the back country, and raid the settlements; their speciality is poisoning cattle. They smear plantalu leaves with their own particular brand of cattle, exterminator and scatter them about among the herds at night. In the morning- as inauy of the cattle fx» have partaken are dead, and have been ahandoned by their owners. The Mooches flay toe dead animals and sell their hides. Pursued, these honest creatures make at full speed for the jungle. If they reach it, all hope of capturiug. them Is at an end, but even when thtey discover that they must be overtaken before they reach It they by no means lose heart, and are measurably sure of escaping, especially if, as is very often the case in India, the surface is burned over and the trees and bushes that have not been consumed are charred and black-. ent'd and bereft of their foliage, and many, pOTh«ps, reduced to little more than biaeic♦wd stomps by the Ore by which the fields are annually burnt over. If hard pressed In such a country as this, they cease to fly, sad immediately disappear. For a long time %h« English troops which policed the districts where they made their raids were Completely nonplussed; again and again, on :the very, point of being captured, the Mooches escaped by miraculously vanlahing,and officers as well as soldiers became superstitions. With the power of maintaining fixed, immovable postures, in which their race ■perns to excel, these Indians, grasping In their hands such blackened branches as they plcTs up in their flight, can Instantly astame, and retain for a long time, an almost perfect mimicry of the groups of blackened stomps sad half-burned trees with which th« country abounds.