Page:The Melanesians Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore.djvu/307

] day all the people assemble in the middle of the village; a man of the waivung division to which the deceased did not belong, one near to him by male descent, mounts a tree and calls all the names of the deceased one after another, for a great man has many names (page 114); there is a solemn silence as the names are called, all listen for a sound; if any sound is heard they take it for the answer of the dead, and all raise the wailing cry because it is the last time they will hear his voice. They have no thought of driving away the ghost; they call to him to come and take all their food and all they have, and go with it to Nggalevu. If no sound answers to the last call they think he has already gone. A man is buried with his bow and arrows and his best ornaments; but his pigs'-tusk bracelets are put on upside down. Nggalevu will know him to be a great man by what he sees with him and upon him, for he will be seen as a man is seen though he be a ghost, a tamtegi; what it is of the ornaments and other things that will be seen they have not considered, but certainly not a tamtegi, nor a soul; it raises a smile to ask whether there be the tamtegi of a bow. When a man dies his cocoa-nut-trees, fruit-trees, and things in his garden are cut down and destroyed. This is done, they say, out of a feeling of tenderness and sorrow; no one but he shall enjoy them.

The dead man's soul when it leaves his dwelling-place makes its way along the mountain path to Manaro, to the lake which fills the crater of the island. Sometimes men notice recent footsteps on the path, and go down to the villages to ask who has died and just gone up. The abode of the dead is Lolomboetogitogi, and the descent to it is by a volcanic vent near the lake. There ghosts assemble, and there has always been Nggalevu, a vui, a spirit not a ghost, who is the master of the place, and receives the new-comers. There is also a pig by which they have to pass. Beside the lake, on the farther side, which no man has been known to reach, there is a volcanic vent which sends up clouds of steam. Men go up to the nearer side of the lake and climb a tree