h as he fell in with. His adventures after death furnish
the theme of many stories. However, it is much to his credit that,
finding the land of the dead a barren region without vegetation of any
sort, he, by an act of generation, converted it into a garden, where
bananas, yams, taro, coco-nuts and other fruits and vegetables grew and
ripened in a single night. Having thus fertilised the lower region, he
announced to Adiri, the lord of the subterranean realm, that he was the
precursor of many more men and women who would descend thereafter into
the spirit world. His prediction has been amply fulfilled; for ever
since then everybody has gone by the same road to the same place.[352]
However, when a person dies, his or her spirit may linger for a few days
in the neighbourhood of its old home before setting out for the far
country. During that time the spirit may occasionally be seen by
ordinary people, and accordingly the natives are careful not to go out
in the dark for fear of coming bolt on the ghost; and they sometimes
adopt other precautions against the prowling spectre, who might
otherwise haunt them and carry them off with him to deadland. Some
classes of ghosts are particularly dreaded on account of their
malignity; such, for example, are the spirits of women who have died in
childbed, and of people who have hanged themselves or been devoured by
crocodiles. Such ghosts loiter for a long time about the places where
they died, and they are very dangerous, because they are for ever luring
other people to die the same death which they died themselves. Yet
another troop of evil ghosts are the souls of those who were beheaded in
battle; for they kill and devour people, and at night you may see the
blood shining like fire as it gushes from the gaping gashes in their
throats.[353]

[Sidenote: The path of the ghosts to Adiri. Adiri, the land of the
dead.]

The road to Adiri or deadland is fairly well known, and the people can
point to many landmarks on it. For example, in the island of Paho there
is a tree called _dani_, under which the departing spirits sit down and
weep. When they have cried their fill and rubbed their poor
tear-bedraggled faces with mud, they make little pellets of clay and
throw them at the tree, and anybody can see for himself the pellets
sticking to the branches. It is true that the pellets resemble the nests
of insects, but this resemblance is only fortuitous. Near the tree is a
rocking stone, which