Of ceremonies connected with birth, if any take place, we saw nothing at all. The only marriage ceremony that took place during our stay in the country has been referred to on a preceding page.
Deaths were unfortunately more frequent, and if they were not accompanied by any elaborate ceremonial they were, at all events, widely advertised, sometimes indeed even before the event itself. A wretched man became very ill at Parimau in August, and it was soon evident that his days were numbered. Members of his family carried him out of the house and laid him in the sunlight for a time, and then took him back into the house again at least half a dozen times a day. Now and again, when he dozed, they set up the dreadful wail that is customary when a person dies, and he had to wake up and assure them of his continued life. At night his hut was crowded with sympathetic watchers, and with the smoke of the fire and much tobacco the atmosphere must have been nearly insupportable. As our own house was distant only about forty yards across the river we could plainly hear his laboured breathing, and when it grew softer they wailed again until the wonder was that he did not die. On the third day they dug a grave for him, but still he lingered on, and it was not until the fifth night, when a tremendous flood came down and swept away the village so that all the people had to take refuge in their canoes, that he died.
WAILING AT DEATH
When a death occurs the people in the hut at once begin to wail, then the people in the neighbouring huts join in and soon the whole village is wailing. It is a very peculiar and very striking chorus. Each individual wails on one note, and as there are perhaps five notes ranging from a very high pitch to a deep murmured bass being sung at once, the effect is most mournful. The occasional beat of a drum adds not a little to the general effect of lamentation. It must be admitted, however, that the wailing is not always a musical performance. Sometimes the mourning man behaves in the way that a child does when it is described as “roaring”; he puckers up his face in the most extraordinary contortions, “roars” at the top of his voice with occasional heart-breaking sobs, while the tears course down his face, and the complete picture is ludicrous in the extreme.
The disposal of the dead nearly always takes place just before dawn, but the method of it is not always the same. The most common practice is to bury the body in a shallow grave dug in the nearest convenient spot, sometimes within a few yards of the huts. The body is wrapped in mats and laid flat in the grave, which is then filled up, and its place is perhaps marked by a stick, but in a day or two it is forgotten and people trample on it without heed.
We observed one instance of a more elaborate kind of burial. The corpse, wrapped in leaves and mats, was taken out into the jungle and placed on a platform about four feet high, which had been put up for the purpose. After placing the body on the platform the men who had carried it walked down to the river, shouted once in unison, and then, having received an answering shout from the men in the village, one of them threw a small triangular piece of wood out into the stream. In the meantime the family of the dead man disappeared into the jungle, from which they soon emerged quite naked, plastered all over with mud and decorated with wisps of climbing plants. The next two days were spent in digging a grave and making a coffin shaped like a small canoe; this however was found to be too small and was not used. On the third day the body was placed in the grave, and an ornamental post placed in the ground at each end, but contrary to our hopes (for the state of that man was becoming very offensive) they did not fill in the grave. They merely covered the body with leaves and turned it over every day. At intervals the widow, quite naked, save for a plastering of mud, crawled on hands and knees from her hut, which was less than five yards distant, and visited the grave. In a few days a providential flood came and filled up the grave and put an end to what had become for us an almost intolerable nuisance.
Both at Wakatimi and at Parimau our camp commanded a good view of the native village, and a death always provided us with the mild excitement of wondering in what new way they would celebrate the event. On one occasion when a woman died, the bereaved husband and another man walked slowly down to the river and waded out into about three feet of water. There the widower submitted to being washed all over by the other man and finally to being held under water by him for half a minute or more, after which they walked solemnly back to the village.
DISPOSAL OF THE DEAD
Early in the morning of the day after the death of the natoo of Wakatimi all the women and girls of the village, to the number of sixty or seventy, came down to the river, all of them without a vestige of clothing, and in the shallow water a foot or two deep they swam and crawled and wriggled up the river for a hundred yards or more, wailing loudly all the time. Sometimes they came out on to the bank and rolled in the mud, and finally they all went out of the water and stood wailing in front of the dead man’s house.