Houses of tlie Solomott Islanders. 69 



the front end of the building forming a kind of portico. A neat thatch of the leaves of the sago-palni 

 covers the sides and roof of each building. 



With regard to the internal arrangements of the houses in this part of the Solcnion group, 

 but little remains to be said. In many houses a portion of a space is partitioned off for sleeping 

 purposes, usuall)- one of the corners ; in others, again, the interior is divided into two halves by a 

 cross partition. More attention is here paid to the comfort of repose than on the eastern islands. 

 In the place of the single mat laid on the ground, they have low couches, raised a foot to eighteen 

 inches above the floor, on which they lay their mats ; whilst a round cylinder of wood serves them 

 as a pillow. These couches, which the natives can improvise in the bush in a few minutes, are 

 usually nothing more than a layer of stout poles, such as the slender trunks of the areca palms, 

 resting at their ends on two logs. 



In the Tambu-houses of St. Christoval and the adjoining islands we have a style of building 

 on which all the mechanical skill of which the natives are possessed has been brought to bear. 

 These sacred buildings have many and varied uses. Women are forbidden to enter their walls ; and 

 in some coast villages, as at Sapuna in the island of Santa Anna, where the tambu house overlooks 

 the beach, women are not even permitted to cross the beach in front. The tambu houses of the 

 coast villages are employed chiefly for keeping the war-canoes, each chief being allowed, as an 

 honorable mark of his position, the privilege of there placing his own war-canoe ; but in the inland 

 villages, thes buildings are of course no longer employed for this purpose. Another use to which 

 these buildings may be put is described on page 53, in connection with the tambu house of Sapuna 

 in Santa Anna, in which are deposited, enclosed in the wooden figure of a shark, the skulls of ordi- 

 nary men, and the entire bodies of the chiefs. 



The front of the tambu-house in his native village is, for the Solomon Islander, a common 

 place of resort, more especially toward the close of the afternoon. There he meets his fellows and 

 listens to the news of his own little world ; and it is to this spot that any native who niaj* be a stranger 

 to the village first directs his steps, and on arriving states his errand or particular business. In my 

 numerous excursions, when thirsty or tired, I always used to follow the native custom in this matter, 

 being always treated hospitably and never with any rudeness. The interior of these buildings is 

 free to any man to lie down in and sleep. On one occasion, when passing a night in an inland village 

 of St. Christoval, I slept in the tambu-house, the onh' white man amongst a dozen natives. Blood- 

 shed, I believe, rarely occurs in these buildings; and they are for this reason viewed somewhat in 

 the light of a sanctuary. 



And now we come to the connecting link, a gruesome one, that binds the build- 

 ers of important, not alone sacred, houses throughout the Pacific, from Ha-waii to New 

 Zealand, from Fiji to the Solomons — the human sacrifice. And again the bond between 

 the man, at least the savage man, and the pig alread}' referred to. Returning to our 

 author we read : 



The completion of a new tambu-house is alwajs an occasion of a festival in a village. The 

 festival is often accompanied by the sacrifice of human life ; and the leg and arm bones of the victim 

 may be sometimes seen suspended to the roof overhead. In the tambu-house of the village of Makia, 

 on the east coast of Uji, I observed hanging from the roof the two temporal bones, the right ftn.ur 

 and the left humerus of the victim who had been killed and eaten at the opening of the buildirg; 

 and similarly suspended in the tambu-house of the hill-village of Lawa on the north side of St. Chris- 

 toval, in which I passed the night, I noticed over my head as I lay on my mat the left femur, tibia and 

 fibula, and the left humerus of the unfortunate man who had been killed and eaten on the completion 

 of the building twelve months before. At these feasts there is a great slaughter of pigs that have 



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