4.8 MOURNING CEREMONIALS. 



looking very dismal. Near bj'', there were nine or ten of his wives 

 all well past the prime of life, withered and haggish, with heads 

 shaven and faces plastered with lime as a token of mourning. They 

 were squatting on the ground, and were engaged in droning out a 

 dismal chant, reminding me of a group of witches. Accompanying 

 Cxorai into his house, I found there a numerous gathering of his 

 wives all with their faces plastered with lime ; their dead- white 

 features, peering strangely at us through the gloom of the building, 

 gave the whole scene quite an uncanny look. The old chief appeared 

 to feel the loss of his favourite wife and broke down more than once 

 when talking to me of her. He told me that the end came when 

 we dropped our anchor in the bay, and he excused himself on account 

 of his grief from coming off to the ship — "too much cry," as he re- 

 marked of himself to me. When I was leaving him, he asked me 

 on the arrival of the ship at Treasury to inform Mule of his loss, 

 Kaika being the sister of the Treasury chief, and to request that his 

 own sister, Bita, who was Mule's principal wife, should come and 

 visit him. Returning to my canoe I passed some of Gorai's head- 

 men who had plastered their foreheads and a part of their cheeks 

 with lime, an observance, however, which was not followed by either 

 the chief or his sons. 



The next morning most of the men of the village were enorasred 

 in fishing on the reef to obtain material for a great funeral feast that 

 was to be held in the afternoon. When I landed with Lieutenant 

 Leeper in the latter part of the day, we found ourselves on the beach 

 in the midst of about a hundred men carrying their tomahawks, and 

 assembled together on the occasion of the queen's demise. On enter- 

 insr the chief's grounds, which are tabooed to all the men of the 

 village except those on the staff of the chief, we came upon about 

 eighty women performing a funeral dance. Some of them were 

 ( Jorai's wives ; whilst others were the principal women of the neigh- 

 bijuring villages. With their faces white with lime they formed a 

 large circle, in the centre of which were four posts placed erect in 

 the ground, each about ten feet high, charred on one side and rudely 

 carved in imitation of the human head, two of them painted red and 

 two white. Enclosed in the ring and grouped around the posts were 

 six women bearing in their hands the personal belongings of the 

 deceased,, such, as her ba.sket, cushion, &c. To the slow and mea- 

 sui-ed time of the beats of a wooden drum, a hollowed log struck by 

 a man outside the circle, the dancers of the ring adapted their move 



