In the creation narrative that the colonial ethnographer I. H. N. Evans recorded among the Dusun of the Tempasuk and Tuaran districts of North Borneo (modern Sabah), the creator Kinharingan (the Kinoingan of wider Kadazan-Dusun tradition) and his wife Munsumundok emerged from a rock in the middle of the primordial sea and walked across the water until they reached the house of Bisagit, the spirit of smallpox. Bisagit gave the couple earth, which they pounded together with rock to make the land; Kinharingan then fashioned the Dusun people while his wife made the sky. Bisagit thus stands at the very beginning of the world as the owner and giver of the primordial earth, yet he remains an outside power rather than a member of the creator's household. In line with this double character, smallpox — historically one of the most feared epidemic diseases of North Borneo — was understood as the visitation of Bisagit, and Evans treats him as the pre-eminent disease spirit of Tempasuk Dusun religion.