ified or new meanings. Hence the fear of the dead is here, as in many
other places, a fertile source of change in language. Another indication
of the terror inspired by ghosts is the custom of abandoning or
destroying the house in which a death has taken place; and this custom
used to be observed in certain cases at Tubetube and Wagawaga.[350]

[Sidenote: Beliefs and customs concerning the dead in the island of
Kiwai.]

Thus far I have dealt mainly with the beliefs and practices of the
Papuo-Melanesians in the eastern part of British New Guinea. With regard
to the pure Papuan population in the western part of the possession our
information is much scantier. However, we learn that in Kiwai, a large
island at the mouth of the Fly River, the dead are buried in the
villages and the ghosts are supposed to live in the ground near their
decaying bodies, but to emerge from time to time into the upper air and
look about them, only, however, to return to their abode beneath the
sod. Nothing is buried with the corpse; but a small platform is made
over the grave, or sticks are planted in the ground along its sides, and
on these are placed sago, yams, bananas, coco-nuts, and cooked crabs and
fish, all for the spirit of the dead to eat. A fire is also kindled
beside the grave and kept up by the friends for nine days in order that
the poor ghost may not shiver with cold at night. These practices prove
not merely a belief in the survival of the soul after death but a desire
to make it comfortable. Further, when the deceased is a man, his bow and
arrows are stuck at the head of the grave; when the deceased is a woman,
her petticoat is hung upon a stick. No doubt the weapons and the garment
are intended for the use of the ghost, when he or she revisits the upper
air. On the ninth day after the burial a feast is prepared, the drum is
beaten, the conch shell blown, and the chief mourner declares that no
more fires need be lighted and no more food placed on the grave.[351]

[Sidenote: Adiri, the land of the dead, and Sido, the first man who went
thither. The fear of ghosts.]

According to the natives of Kiwai the land of the dead is called Adiri
or Woibu. The first man to go thither and to open up a road for others
to follow him, was Sido, a popular hero about whom the people tell many
tales. But whereas in his lifetime Sido was an admired and beneficent
being, in his ghostly character he became a mischievous elf who played
pranks on suc