Ts'adal хӀама, the 'rain-donkey', is the personified rain power of the Avars, known chiefly through the drought rite that bears its name. When rain failed, a girl, ideally an only daughter or an orphan whose plight alone could stir heaven's pity, or among the Karata a woman of forty or fifty, was wrapped in stems of grass and shrubs called хон and led in procession around a lake or to a rain-stone. Women and children doused the figure with water while singing songs begging God for rain, enacting by sympathetic magic the soaking they wished the sky to grant. The rite fused pre-Islamic weather magic with Muslim prayer, and the rain-donkey remained a living observance across the Avar highlands into the twentieth century.