Page:The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia.djvu/211

Rh of as floating on drift-logs, or on the leaves, boughs, dead seaweed, sea-scum, and the other light substances which litter the surface of the sea. Tomwaya Lakwabulo says that they float all the time around the shores of Tuma, wailing wa, wa, wa. "At night I hear their wailing. I ask, 'What is it?' 'Oh, children; the tide brings them, they come. The spirits in Tuma can see these pre-incarnated infants, and so can Tomwaya Lakwabulo when he descends into the spirit world. But to ordinary people they are invisible. At times, however, fishermen from the northern villages of Kaybola and Lu'ebila, when they go far out into the sea after shark, will hear the wailing—wa, wa, wa—in the sighing of the wind and the waves. Tomwaya Lakwabulo and other informants maintain that such spirit children never float far away from Tuma. They are transported to the Trobriands by the help of another spirit. Tomwaya Lakwabulo gives the following account. "A child floats on a drift log. A spirit sees it is good-looking. She takes it. She is the spirit of the mother or of the father of the pregnant woman (nasusuma). Then she puts it on the head, in the hair, of the pregnant woman, who suffers headache, vomits, and has an ache in the belly. Then the child comes down into the belly, and she is really pregnant. She says: 'Already it (the child) has found me; already they (the spirits) have brought me the child. In this account we find two leading ideas: the active intervention of another spirit—the one who somehow conveys the child back to the Trobriands and gives it to the mother—and the insertion of Rh