their souls quit their bodies and can
wander away down to Panoi. When the living thus make their way to the
spirit land, they are sometimes cautioned by friendly ghosts to eat
nothing there, no doubt lest by partaking of ghostly food they should be
turned to ghosts and never return to the land of the living.[574]

[Sidenote: Disposal of the dead among the Eastern islanders. Burial
customs of the Banks' Islanders.]

We will now consider the various modes in which the Eastern Melanesians
dispose of their dead; for funeral customs commonly furnish some
indication of the ideas which a people entertain as to the state of the
soul after death. The Banks' Islanders generally buried their dead in
the forest not far from the village; but if the deceased was a great man
or died a remarkable death, they might inter him in the village near the
men's clubhouse (_gamal_). A favourite son or child might be buried in
the house itself; but in such cases the grave would be opened after
fifty or a hundred days and the bones taken up and hidden in the forest,
though some of them might be hung up in the house. However, in some
places there was, and indeed still is, a custom of keeping the
putrefying corpse unburied in the house as a mark of affection. At Gaua,
in Santa Maria, the body was dried over slow fires for ten days or more,
till nothing but skin and bones remained; and the women who watched over
it during these days drank the juices of putrefaction which dripped from
the decaying flesh. The same thing used formerly to be done in Mota,
another of the Banks' Islands. The corpses of great men in these islands
were adorned in all their finery and laid out on the open space in the
middle of the village. Here bunches of coco-nuts, yams, and other food
were heaped up beside the body; and an orator of fluent speech addressed
the ghost telling him that when he had gone down to Panoi, the spirit
land, and the ghosts asked him after his rank, he was to give them a
list of all the things heaped beside his dead body; then the ghosts
would know what a great man he was and would treat him with proper
deference. The orator dealt very candidly with the moral character of
the deceased. If he had been a bad man, the speaker would say, "Poor
ghost, will you be able to enter Panoi? I think not." The food which is
piled up beside the body while the orator is pronouncing the eulogium or
the censure of the departed is afterwards heaped up on the grave or