platform by itself for some months. When the
flesh has disappeared from the bones, a kinsman of the deceased, in
strictness a younger brother (_itia_), climbs up into the tree,
dislocates the bones, places them in a wooden vessel, and hands them
down to a female relative. Then the bones are laid in the grave with the
head facing in the direction in which his mother's brother is supposed
to have camped in days of old. After the bones have been thus interred,
the spirit of the dead man is believed to go away and to remain in his
old _alcheringa_ home until such time as he once more undergoes
reincarnation.[271] But in these tribes, as we saw, very old men and
women receive only one burial, being at once laid in an earthy grave and
never set up on a platform in a tree; and we have seen reason to think
that this difference in the treatment of the aged springs from the
indifference or contempt in which their ghosts are held by comparison
with the ghosts of the young and vigorous. In the Warramunga tribe, who
regularly deposit their dead in trees first and in the earth afterwards,
so long as the corpse remains in the tree and the flesh has not
completely disappeared from the bones, the mother of the deceased and
the women who stand to him or her in the relation of tribal motherhood
are obliged from time to time to go to the tree, and sitting under the
platform to allow its putrid juices to drip down on their bodies, into
which they rub them as a token of sorrow. This, no doubt, is intended to
please the jealous ghost; for we are told that he is believed to haunt
the tree and even to visit the camp, in order, if he was a man, to see
for himself that his widows are mourning properly. The time during which
the mouldering remains are left in the tree is at least a year and may
be more.[272] The final ceremony which brings the period of mourning to
an end is curious and entirely different from the one observed by the
Arunta on the same occasion. When the bones have been taken down from
the tree, an arm-bone is put carefully apart from the rest. Then the
skull is smashed, and the fragments together with all the rest of the
bones except the arm-bone, are buried in a hollow ant-hill near the
tree. Afterwards the arm-bone is wrapt up in paper-bark and wound round
with fur-string, so as to make a torpedo-shaped parcel, which is kept by
a tribal mother of the deceased in her rude hovel of branches, till,
after the lapse of some days or we