mal, but, still, it was a meal large enough for
three or four stalwart men.

In a case of fever the natives resorted to charms to drive away the evil
spirit that was supposed to be troubling the patient. The universal
superstition about all maladies is that they are caused by the "evil
eye," directed against the sufferer by some enemy. Should one member of
a tribe be stricken down with a disease, his friends at once come to the
conclusion that he has been "pointed at" by a member of another tribe who
owed him a grudge; he has, in short, been bewitched, and an expedition is
promptly organised to seek out and punish the individual in question and
all his tribe. From this it is obvious that war is of pretty frequent
occurrence. And not only so, but every death is likewise the signal for
a tribal war. There is no verdict of "Death from natural causes."
Punitive expeditions are not organised in the event of slight fevers or
even serious illness--only when the patient dies. A tribe I once came
across some miles inland were visited by a plague of what I now feel sure
must have been smallpox. The disease, they said, had been brought down
from the coast, and although numbers of the blacks died, war was not
declared against any particular tribe. As a rule, the body of the dead
brave is placed upon a platform erected in the forks of trees, and his
weapons neatly arranged below. Then, as decay set in, and the body began
to crumble away, the friends and chiefs would come and observe certain
mystic signs, which were supposed to give information as to what tribe or
individual had caused the death of the deceased.

It must have been within a month of my landing on Yamba's country, in
Cambridge Gulf, that I witnessed my first cannibal feast. One of the
fighting-men had died in our camp, and after the usual observations had
been taken, it was decided that he had been pointed at, and his death
brought about, by a member of another tribe living some distance away. An
expedition of some hundreds of warriors was at once fitted out. The
enemy was apparently only too ready for the fray, because the armies
promptly met in an open plain, and I had an opportunity of witnessing the
extraordinary method by which the Australian blacks wage war. One of the
most redoubtable of our chiefs stepped forward, and explained the reason
of his people's visit in comparatively calm tones. An opposing chief
replied to him, and gradually a heated al