derive new powers.

This over, the boys were all ordered to get up, and march round, hands
on thighs and heads abased, while they learnt a Boorah song, giving new
words for common things, which acted as pass-words hereafter for the
initiated. Into a slow chant these words were strung, as the men and
boys passed round the ring, two of the oldest men standing beating time
with painted spears with tufted tops.

The two boys who had transgressed before looked up again, curious as to
their surroundings. Suddenly the men with the spears roared at the boys
to lower their heads.

The boys laughed. Their fates were sealed. Out flashed the sacred
gubberahs of these two old men.

'Dead is he,' they cried, 'who laughs in the Bunbul where yungawee
burns more fiercely than Yirangal, the sun, where near lies the image
of Byamee: Byamee, father of all, whose laws the tribes are now
obeying.' Then the men chanted to the gubberahs and held them between
the fires and the boys, the light of the flames seemed to play on them
and stretch its beams to the boys, who began to tremble. As louder grew
the chant an answer came from the scrub, the voice of Gayandi; shaking
with fear the boys fell to the ground, to all appearance lifeless. Then
the old men went forward, each with a stone knife in hand. Stooping
over the two boys they opened veins in each, out flowed the blood, and
the other men all raised a death cry. The boys were lifeless. The old
wirreenuns, dipping their stone knives in the blood, touched with them
the lips of all present. Then the bodies were put on the edge of the
sacred fire and the other initiates taken a little further into the
scrub. There they were tried in many ways.

With the Boorah spirits whistling and whizzing all round them, spears
were pointed at them. Their skins were scratched with stone knives and
mussel shells. Hideously painted, fiendish-looking creatures suddenly
rushed upon them. Should they show fear and quail at the Little Boorah
they would be returned to their mothers as cowards unfit for
initiation, and sooner or later sympathetic magic would do its work, a
poison-stick or bone would end them. Or if one of the initiates was
considered stupid and generally incapable, having been brought to the
Boorah for that purpose, he was now, after having been made to suffer
all sorts of indignities, such as eating filth and so on, bound to the
earth, strapped down, killed, and his body burnt.

When the trials