Page:The Melanesians Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore.djvu/303

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xv.]
Aurora. Burial.
281

as those which pass as money) to wrap the corpse in. Women bring out mats, such as are used for sleeping on, and spread them in the open place in the middle of the village, and over these good clean mats. When these are ready, those who have been at work sit on the heap of mats and begin the wailing, so that people at a distance may know that the time has come to swathe the corpse. Then, all having assembled by the heap of mats, men and women carry out the corpse wrapped in a single mat from his house to the weeping crowd; and when they lay him on the mats spread as a bed the crying is wonderful, nothing can be heard at all but that. They put on his belt and his malo dress, and smear him with red earth, and dress his hair with a cock's feather or pigs' tails. His mother, or wives or sisters, throw ashes over their heads and backs. When they have swathed the corpse in mats and bound all round with the vines, some man of the dead man's kin sits upon the bundle, and is carried with it by many men to the grave, which has, been dug by the side of the gamal. After this the wives of the deceased, or his father and mother, do not go about as usual for a hundred days, they spend the day at home. Men may walk about, but the female mourners cannot go into the open, and their faces may not be seen; they stay indoors, and in the dark, and cover themselves with a large mat reaching to the ground. In the early morning the widow goes out of the house covered over with a mat, to weep at the graveside; every day she does this till the hundredth day, and also in the afternoon; and not she only, many people of the village weep. All the women put on a mat, "as large as a single plank," which remains on their head as a sign that they are in mourning for the death, and refrain from certain food; but the immediate relatives of the deceased may not eat yam, caladium, bananas, or other good food; they eat only the gigantic caladium, bread-fruit, cocoa-nuts, and mallow, and other things; and all these they seek in the bush where they grow wild, not eating those which have been planted. They count five days, and then build up stones over the grave; great heaps of stones, much larger than are