Page:Papuan Fairy Tales.djvu/31

Rh he took a long cord of pandanus and strung upon it the shell money which was not of the best. But the red and large and round he placed in a heap upon the ground, and commanded that it should be laid up. (For this reason is the shell money of earth poor and pale, but in heaven exceeding fair and beautiful.)

Now when the cord was fully threaded, the man made a loop at one end and sat thereon, and said to his son, "I am about to depart to my own country. Fasten this cord to a tree, and continue to let it down until night. And the slack cord which will be still in thy hands thou shalt bind round the tree once more until the day dawn. Then let down the cord again until it shall be loose, by which sign thou shalt know that I have reached mine own land."

Thus and thus did the lad, and all night the man hung between the heaven and the earth, swinging to and fro as the winds blew upon him. And at dawn the child did even as his father had bidden him, and let out the cord until the man lighted on one of his own coco palms, and the cord fell upon the earth and remained.

Now, as the man was thus seated on high, it came to pass that the daughter who had been born to him upon earth came to gaze on her father's coconuts. She knew she might but look, and that to taste was forbidden, for her mother mourned her father as one long dead, and a taboo had been laid on all the coco palms which had been his. But, as she gazed, she