tangle. In disposition the Monumbo are
cheerful and contented, proud of themselves and their country; they
think they are the cleverest and most fortunate people on earth, and
look down with pity and contempt on Europeans. According to them the
business of the foreign settlers in their country is folly, and the
teaching of the missionaries is nonsense. They subsist by agriculture,
hunting, and fishing. Their well-kept plantations occupy the level
ground and in some places extend up the hill-sides. Among the plants
which they cultivate are taro, yams, sweet potatoes, bananas, various
kinds of vegetables, and sugar-cane. Among their fruit-trees are the
sago-palm, the coco-nut palm, and the bread-fruit tree. They make use
both of earthenware and of wooden vessels. Their dances, especially
their masked dances, which are celebrated at intervals of four or five
years, have excited the warm admiration of the despised European.[380]

[Sidenote: Beliefs of the Monumbo concerning the spirits of the dead.
Dread of ghosts.]

With regard to their religion and morality I will quote the evidence of
a Catholic missionary who has laboured among them. "The Monumbo are
acquainted with no Supreme Being, no moral good or evil, no rewards, no
place of punishment or joy after death, no permanent immortality....
When people die, their souls go to the land of spirits, a place where
they dwell without work or suffering, but which they can also quit.
Betel-chewing, smoking, dancing, sleeping, all the occupations that they
loved on earth, are continued without interruption in the other world.
They converse with men in dreams, but play them many a shabby trick,
take possession of them and even, it may be, kill them. Yet they also
help men in all manner of ways in war and the chase. Men invoke them,
pray to them, make statues in their memory, which are called _dva_
(plural _dvaka_), and bring them offerings of food, in order to obtain
their assistance. But if the spirits of the dead do not help, they are
rated in the plainest language. Death makes no great separation. The
living converse with the dead very much as they converse with each
other. Time alone brings with it a gradual oblivion of the departed.
Falling stars and lightning are nothing but the souls of the dead, who
stick dry banana leaves in their girdles, set them on fire, and then fly
through the air. At last when the souls are old they die, but are not
annihilated, for they are change