Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/149

Rh no sign of pain, and this is repeated for days. All the men have contributed to the food for the “spirits,” who dwell apart in houses arranged for them. Sometimes they kill and eat a youth, and, in fact, they do as they please. When they depart, their house and everything left behind is burnt, but the old men have had a real good time. How the youths cannot see through it all is a mystery. Their masked dances, and especially the masks, are extraordinary and fantastic to a degree. The mask houses standing in a tropical jungle are weird but picturesque objects.

Some aristocratic families retain the hereditary secret of making poisoned arrows. A wound from one of these produces tetanus.

The canary tree grows much. It has a blue plum with a nut: both plum and kernel are eaten. The blue-crested pigeons are very fond of these plums, but disgorge the nut, hence they spread and sow it everywhere.

The borrolong is a beautiful tree with long, pendant, yellow-spiked blooms; but of course the vegetation everywhere is as wonderful as it is beautiful, and some of the timber, such as sandalwood and cedar, is magnificent, and New Guinea and its islands are paradises for the botanist and the naturalist, and being as yet mostly unexplored, offer for long an interesting field to scientific men.

What may they not yet discover in those unknown silent lands! It is said there are apes in the interior of some places, but nothing is known about them or what is really there. There are many snakes, poisonous and non-poisonous, and lizards of all sorts, the monitor being of great size. There are rumours of a new animal having been seen, a large marsupial ant-eater, I believe. But perhaps there is no