[Note: this transcription was produced by an automatic OCR engine]

I34 WITH NATIVES IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC

quarrelled with his chief and separated from his clan.
The good man was very anxious to marry, but no girl
would have him, as he had had two wives, and had,
quite without malice, strangled his second wife by
way of curing her of an illness. I was reminded of
this little episode every time I looked at the man’s
long, bony fingers.

One day a native asked me for medicine for his
brother. I tried to find out the nature of the ailment,
and decided to give him calomel, urging his brother
to take it to him at once. The man had eaten a
quarter of a pig all by himself, but, of course, it was
said that he had been poisoned. His brother, instead
of hurrying home, had a little visit with his friends at
the coast, until it was dark and he was afraid to go
home through the bush alone; so he waited till next
morning, when it was too late. The man’s death
naturally made the murder theory a certainty, so the
body was not buried, but laid out in the hut, with all
sorts of finery. Around it, in spite of the fearful
odour, all the women sat for ten days, in a cloud of
blow-flies. They burned strong-scented herbs to kill
the smell, and dug a little trench across the floor, in
order to keep the liquids from the decaying corpse
from running into the other half of the house. The
nose and mouth of the body were stopped up with
clay and lime, probably to keep the soul from getting
out, and the body was surrounded by a little hut. In
the gamal close by sat all the men, sulky, revengeful,

and planning war, which, in fact, broke out within a
few days after my departure.