journey to Tsiabiloum, the land of the dead. It is a country more
fair and fertile than tongue can tell. Yams, taros, sugar-canes, bananas
all grow there in profusion and without cultivation. There are forests
of wild orange-trees, also, and the golden fruits serve the blessed
spirits as playthings. You can tell roughly how long it is since a
spirit quitted the upper world by the colour of the orange which he
plays with; for the oranges of those who have just arrived are green;
the oranges of those who have been longer dead are ripe; and the oranges
of those who died long ago are dry and wizened. There is no night in
that blessed land, and no sleep; for the eyes of the spirits are never
weighed down with slumber. Sorrow and sickness, decrepitude and death
never enter; even boredom is unknown. But it is only the nights, or
rather the hours corresponding to nights on earth, which the spirits
pass in these realms of bliss. At daybreak they revisit their old home
on earth and take up their posts in the cemeteries where they are
honoured; then at nightfall they flit away back to the spirit-land
beneath the sea, there to resume their sport with oranges, green,
golden, or withered, till dawn of day. On these repeated journeys to and
fro they have nothing to fear from the grim fisherman and his net; it is
only on their first passage to the nether world that he catches and
trounces them.[522]

[Sidenote: Burial customs of the New Calendonians.]

The bodies of the dead are buried in shallow graves, which are dug in a
sacred grove. The corpse is placed in a crouching attitude with the head
at or above the surface of the ground, in order to allow of the skull
being easily detached from the trunk, at a subsequent time. In token of
sorrow the nearest relations of the deceased tear the lobes of their
ears and inflict large burns on their arms and breasts. The houses,
nets, and other implements of the dead are burnt; his plantations are
ravaged, his coco-nut palms felled with the axe. The motive for this
destruction of the property of the deceased is not mentioned, but the
custom points to a fear of the ghost; the people probably make his old
home as unattractive as possible in order to offer him no temptation to
return and haunt them. The same fear of the ghost, or at all events of
the infection of death, is revealed by the stringent seclusion and
ceremonial pollution of the grave-diggers. They are two in number; no
other persons ma