return, he will probably fall sick. Sneezing is a sign that the soul has
returned to the body, and if a man does not sneeze for many weeks
together, his friends look on it as a grave symptom; his soul, they
imagine, must be a very long way off.[315] Moreover, a man's soul may be
enticed from his body and detained by a demon or _tabu_, as the Koita
call it. Thus, when a man who has been out in the forest returns home
and shakes with fever, it is assumed that he has fallen down and been
robbed of his soul by a demon. In order to recover that priceless
possession, the sufferer and his friends repair to the exact spot in the
forest where the supposed robbery was perpetrated. They take with them a
long bamboo with some valuable ornaments tied to it, and two men support
it horizontally over a pot which is filled with grass. A light is put to
the grass, and as it crackles and blazes a number of men standing round
the pot strike it with stones till it breaks, whereat they all groan.
Then the company returns to the village, and the sick man lies down in
his house with the bamboo and its ornaments hung over him. This is
supposed to be all that is needed to effect a perfect cure; for the
demon has kindly accepted the soul of the ornaments and released the
soul of the sufferer, who ought to recover accordingly.[316]

[Sidenote: Beliefs of the Koita concerning the state of the dead.
Alleged communications with the dead by means of mediums.]

However, at death the soul goes away for good and all; at least there
appears to be no idea that it will ever return to life in the form of an
infant, as the souls of the Central Australian aborigines are supposed
to do. All Koita ghosts live together on Mount Idu, and their life is
very like the one they led here on earth. There is no distinction
between the good and the bad, the righteous and the wicked, the strong
and the weak, the young and the old; they all fare alike in the
spirit-land, with one exception. Like the Motu, the Koita are in the
habit of boring holes in their noses and inserting ornaments in the
holes; and they think that if any person were so unfortunate as to be
buried with his nose whole and entire, his ghost would have to go about
in the other world with a creature like a slow-worm depending from his
nostrils on either side. Hence, when anybody dies before the operation
of nose-boring has been performed on him or her, the friends take care
to bore a hole in the nose of th