Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/690

674 that there beset the passing shade. The eldest of the three became at times positively uncanny, for he stopped here and there in the driving rain to execute a sort of weird gamboling dance, whether out of pure excess of spirits or a praiseworthy intention of exorcising the gods of the place I do not know. Little by little I wormed out of them the whole tradition, with fragments of the sagas in which it was preserved. After I got home I set two of my native collectors to write it all down. It is far too long to give here in its entirety, but I will try to condense it.

Long ago—so long ago that the tradition has become dim—the ghosts of the dead used to annoy the living. They whistled in the houses, turned the yams rotten in the ground, filled the cooking pots with live snakes, or played some other of the pranks in which the Fijian ghost delights. And the living reasoned with themselves, and found that it was because of the bad state of the road to Nakauvadra that the shades could not find their way to the sacred mountain, and so they stayed about their old haunts. So the tribes banded together and built a road for the ghosts of their dead to travel over, and thenceforward they did not stay to annoy the living.

When a man died, his body was washed and laid in its shroud, and a whale's tooth was put upon his breast to be his stone to throw at the pandanus tree; and while his friends were still weeping, his spirit left the body and went and stood on the bank of the "Water of the Shades" (Wainiyalo), at the place called Lelele—the ferry—and cried to Ceba, the ghostly ferryman, who brought the end of his canoe which was of hard vesi if it was for a chief, but the end that was of breadfruit wood for a vulgar shade.

Across the stream the shade climbed the hill of Nathegani, where grew the pandanus tree. And he threw his whale's tooth at it, and if he hit it he sat down to await the coming of his wife, who, he now knew, was being strangled to his manes; but if he missed the pandanus tree he went on, weeping aloud, for he knew that his wife had been unfaithful to him in life, and that she cared not to be strangled to accompany him. Then he came to the ghost scatterer, Droydroyalo, who strode toward him and pounded his neck with a great stone, scattering the ndawa fruit he was carrying to eat on his journey. Thence he journeyed to Drekei, where dwell the twin goddesses Nino, who crept on him, peering at him, and gnashing their terrible teeth; and the shade shrieked in terror and fled away. As he fled up the path he came to a spring and stopped to drink; and as soon as he tasted the water he ceased weeping, and his friends also ceased weeping in his home, for they straightway forgot their sorrows and were consoled. Therefore this spring is called the Wai-ni-dula Water of Solace. And when he stood erect from drinking, he look—ed afar