-nut fibre, which emitted clouds of smoke. With an
unsteady rickety gait the beldame hobbled after her rapidly retreating
son, who turned round from time to time, skipping and posturing
derisively as if to taunt her, and then hurrying away again westward.
Thus the two quaint figures retreated further and further, he in front
and she behind, till they were lost to view. But still the drums
continued to beat and the singers to chant their wild song, when nothing
was to be seen but the deserted beach with the sky and the drifting
clouds above and the white waves breaking on the strand. Meantime the
two actors in the sacred drama made their way westward till their
progress was arrested by the sea. They plunged into it and swimming
westward unloosed their leafy envelopes and let them float away to the
spirit-land in the far island beyond the rolling waters. But the men
themselves swam back to the beach, resumed the dress of ordinary
mortals, and quietly mingled with the assembly of mourners.[299]

[Sidenote: Personation of ghosts by masked men.]

Such was the first act of the drama. The second followed immediately
about ten o'clock in the morning. The actors in it were twenty or thirty
men disguised as ghosts or spirits of the dead (_zera markai_). Their
bodies were blackened from the neck to the ankles, but the lower part of
their faces and their feet were dyed bright red, and a red triangle was
painted on the front of their bodies. They wore head-dresses of grass
with long projecting ribs of coco-nut leaves, and a long tail of grass
behind reaching down to the level of the knees. In their hands they held
long ribs of coco-nut leaf. They were preceded by a curious figure
called _pager_, a man covered from head to foot with dry grass and dead
banana leaves, who sidled along with an unsteady rolling gait in a
zigzag course, keeping his head bowed, his red-painted hands clasped in
front of his face, and his elbows sticking out from both sides of his
body. In spite of his erratic course and curious mode of progression he
drew away from the troop of ghosts behind him and came on towards the
spectators, jerking his head from side to side, his hands shaking, and
wailing as he went. Behind him marched the ghosts, with their hands
crossed behind their backs and their faces looking out to sea. When they
drew near to the orchestra, who were singing and drumming away, they
halted and formed in two lines facing the spectators. They now