ome dancing towards the beach. If
he represented a woman, his costume was more elaborate than it had been
under the shades of evening the night before. His whole body was painted
red. A petticoat of leaves encircled his waist: a mask of leaves,
surmounted by tufts of cassowary and pigeon feathers, concealed his
head; and in his hands he carried brooms of coco-nut palm leaf. If he
personated a man, he held a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other,
and his costume was the usual dress of a dancer, with the addition of a
head-dress of leaves and feathers and a diamond-shaped ornament of
bamboo, which he held in his teeth and which entirely concealed his
features. He approached dancing and mimicking the gestures of the person
whom he represented. At the sight the women wailed, and the widow would
cry out, "That's my husband," the mother would cry out, "That's my son."
Then suddenly the drummers would call out, "Ah! Ah! Ai! Ai!" at which
the women would fall to the ground, while the dancer retreated into the
forest. In this way one ghost after the other would make his appearance,
play his part, and vanish. Occasionally two of them would appear and
dance together. The women and children, we are told, really believed
that the actors were the ghosts of their dead kinsfolk. When the first
dancer had thus danced before the people, he advanced with the drummers
towards the framework on which the mummy was stretched, and there he
repeated his dance before it. But the people were not allowed to witness
this mystery; they remained wailing on the beach, for this was the
moment at which the ghost of the dead man or woman was supposed to be
departing for ever to the land of shades.[307]

[Sidenote: Preservation of the mummy.]

Some days afterwards the mummy was affixed to a new framework of bamboo
and carried into the hut. In former times the huts were of a beehive
shape, and the framework which supported the mummy was fastened to the
central post on which the roof rested. The body thus stood erect within
the house. Its dried skin had been painted red. The empty orbits of the
eyes had been filled with pieces of pearl-shell of the nautilus to
imitate eyes, two round spots of black beeswax standing for the pupils.
The ears were decorated with shreds of the sago-palm or with grey seeds.
A frontlet of pearl-shell nautilus adorned the head, and a crescent of
pearl-shell the breast. In the darkness of the old-fashioned huts the
body looked