esent members of the family who died a natural death at home; they
are never, as in Ansoes and Waropen, images of persons who have been
murdered or slain in battle. Hence they form a kind of Penates, who are
supposed to lead an invisible life in the family circle. The natives of
the Negen Negorijen, for example, believe that these wooden images
(_karwar_), which are both male and female, contain the souls of their
ancestors, who protect the house and household and are honoured at
festivals by having portions of food set beside their images.[507] The
Seget Sele, who occupy the extreme westerly point of New Guinea, bury
their dead in the island of Lago and set up little houses in the forest
for the use of the spirits of their ancestors. But these little houses
may never be entered or even approached by members of the family.[508] A
traveller, who visited a hut occupied by members of the Seget tribe in
Princess Island, or Kararaboe, found a sick man in it and observed that
before the front and back door were set up double rows of roughly hewn
images painted with red and black stripes. He was told that these images
were intended to keep off the sickness; for the natives thought that it
would not dare to run the gauntlet between the double rows of figures
into the house.[509] We may conjecture that these rude images
represented ancestral spirits who were doing sentinel duty over the sick
man.

[Sidenote: Customs concerning the dead among the natives of the Macluer
Gulf.]

Among the natives of the Macluer Gulf, which penetrates deep into the
western part of Dutch New Guinea, the souls of dead men who have
distinguished themselves by bravery or in other ways are honoured in the
shape of wooden images, which are sometimes wrapt in cloth and decorated
with shells about the neck. In Sekar, a village on the south side of the
gulf, small bowls, called _kararasa_ after the spirits of ancestors who
are believed to lodge in them, are hung up in the houses; on special
occasions food is placed in them. In some of the islands of the Macluer
Gulf the dead are laid in hollows of the rocks, which are then adorned
with drawings of birds, hands, and so forth. The hands are always
painted white or yellowish on a red ground. The other figures are drawn
with chalk on the weathered surface of the rock. But the natives either
cannot or will not give any explanation of the custom.[510]

[Sidenote: Burial and mourning customs in the Mimika distric