Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/253

Rh death in the form of a spider, seeking lodgment in the ancestral image, as has been already described.

The Niha conceptions of the condition after death are confused. The bechoe go below into the city of the dead, where they have to die nine times, or, according to some, as many times as the man has lived years on the earth, and are supposed to lead lives like the earthly lives. They take with them their earthly utensils and possessions in the form of shadows, and can not expect to attain a higher state of wealth than they did on the earth; therefore living men accumulate as much wealth as possible, in order that they may take the shadow of it with them. The bechoe of wicked men return to the corpse in the grave, and are crushed by the earth. Men who have no male issue are turned after their manifold deaths into night-moths; those who are murdered, into locusts. The bechoe of murdered men and suicides are assigned separate abodes from the other bechoe. At last, it is said, the earth will die, or sink into the sea, and there will be a new earth. Then the bechoe of the cats will let the bechoe of the men go over the gulf into the new earth, the edge of a sword serving as a bridge. Any one who, in life, has causelessly tormented or killed a cat, will be thrown by them into the abyss. Therefore every person is afraid to go near cats to annoy them. Only those also who have had issue can go over, while others become butterflies or something of the kind. The bechoe of children are carried over by their mothers, and go to God.

After Lowalangi, with whom men have little to do except to make an occasional offering, the most important of the divinities is Latoere. He tried to make men from the tora-fruit, and, not succeeding, called upon Lowalangi to help him, and received the creatures as a gift of swine. Hence he is called Latoere of the thousand swine. He occasionally eats a man—that is, his shadow—as one would slaughter and eat a pig, when the fact is manifested by the illness of the victim. In this case an offering is made to induce him to choose another, fatter man, from a different part of the country. If this petition fails, the man will have to die. There are other demons, who feed upon the shadows of men, stalking like hunters through the land, using the rainbow for their net, and assisted by air-dogs, whose heads are turned round so as to look backward, and which are occasionally heard to bark. It is possible, however, by means of special offerings, to make one's self unfailingly sound, unless Lowalangi has decreed that there shall be an end of the person in question. The shadows that fall victims to these divine appetites are special shadows, and not those which are cast in the sun.

The people also imagine underground ghosts, or bechoe, which live in caves or holes, and trouble men or eat their