Another account of the blood-covenant rite in Burmah is kindly furnished to me, by the Rev. Dr. M. H. Bixby, of Providence, Rhode Island; who was also for some years a missionary among the Karens. He says:
“In my first journey over the mountains of Burmah, into Shanland, toward Western China, I passed through several tribes of wild Karens among whom the practice of ‘covenanting by blood’ prevailed.
“‘If you mean what you say,’ said the old chief of the Gecho tribe to me, referring to my professions of friendship, ‘You will drink truth with me.’ ‘Well, what is drinking truth?’ I said. In reply, he said: ‘This is our custom. Each chief pierces his arm--draws blood--mingles it in a vessel with whisky, and drinks of it; both promising to be true and faithful to each other, down to the seventh generation.’
“After the chiefs had drunk of the mingled blood and whisky, each one of their followers drunk of it also, and were thereby included in the covenant of friendship.
“A company of Shans laid a plot to kill me and my company in Shanland, for the purpose of plunder. They entered into covenant with each other by drinking the blood of their leader mingled with whisky, or a kind of beer made from rice.
“Those wild mountain tribes have strange traditions which indicate that they once had the Old Testament Scriptures, although now they have no written language. Some of the Karen tribes have a written language, given them by the missionaries.
“The covenant, also, exists in modified forms, in which the blood is omitted.”
In various parts of the East, a _tree_ is given prominence in the rite of blood-covenanting. In Burmah, as above shown, one mode of covenanting is by the mutual planting of a tree.[710] In Timor, a newly planted fig-tree is made to bear a portion of the blood of the covenant, and to remain as a witness to the sacred rite itself.[711] In one portion of Central Africa, a forked palm branch is held by the two parties, at their entering into blood-friendship;[712] and, in another region, the ashes of a burned tree and the blood of the covenanting brothers are brought into combination, in the use of a knotted palm branch which the brothers together hold.[713] And, again, in Canaan, in the days of Abraham, the planting of a tree was an element in covenant making; as shown in the narrative of the covenant which Abraham cut with Abimelech, at Beer-sheba.[714]