Page:The Melanesians Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore.djvu/173

Rh snake at last could bear it no longer, and cried out weeping, 'I go, and who will help you now?' She made her way down to the sea accordingly, and her track became a watercourse. Leaving the island, she swam across first to Ugi, but from thence she could see the Bauro mountain; she went on further to Ulawa, and thence again to the south-east end of Malanta, but even there in clear weather she could see her former home. She crossed therefore to Marau, the south-east part of Guadalcanar nearest to San Cristoval, where the view of the mountain of Bauro is shut off by the nearer hills; there she rests till the present day. Since her departure all things in San Cristoval have deteriorated. Snakes upon the Bauro mountain are venerated as the progeny or representatives of Kahansibware; but they are simple snakes, and she was a Hi'ona, or Figona.

In the Banks' Islands and in the Northern New Hebrides the purely spiritual beings who are incorporeal are innumerable and unnamed. These are they whose representative form is generally a stone, who haunt the places that are sacred because of their presence, and who connect themselves with certain snakes, owls, sharks, and other creatures. There is in these things a medium of communication with them, and they are powerful to assist those who can approach them, and also to injure men, though they are not of a malignant nature. They are certainly believed to have no body; yet it is impossible for the natives to conceive of them as entirely without form. Men, therefore, have declared that they have seen something, indistinct, with no definite outline, grey like dust, vanishing as soon as it was looked at, near a stone, and this must have been a spirit, vui, wui. But the same word is used to describe beings who are corporeal, and individually known and named. The natives will deny that these have bodies as men have, and assert that they are of the same nature as those which are incorporeal; but yet in the stories that are told about them they figure as men, though possessed of powers which men can never have. Consistency can hardly be expected; the native mind indeed aims high when