400 A NATURALIST'S WANDERINOS 



few words of the song. The men seemed to enjoy themselves, 

 often laughing heartily at their own improvised conceits, but 

 the women might have been absolute automata ; for not a 

 single expression of pleasure, interest, or enjoyment ever 

 passed over their impassive features. The exhibition was 

 one of the saddest possible pictures of the miserable position 

 among the Alefurus of the woman, who, though not treated 

 with cruelty or harshness, lives in abject uncomplaining 

 slavery — as if for the man alone all things, woman especially, 

 were created. 



Next morning, starting early, we continued our ascent 

 through dense forest, full of Ternstroemaceous trees to 

 3600 feet above the sea, the highest point reached in our 

 journey. Just at the summit I came on a curious Pomali sign 

 set up in the forest to protect probably some part of it from 

 depradation. Its exact meaning I could not find out. It 

 consisted of a low house shaped structure, somewhat liko the 

 Matakau seen at AVai Bloi village, and fixed in the ground, 

 protected from harm by large wide couples of wood. Under 

 its cover six little pillars were set in the ground ; on the top 

 of one Avas a peg a few inches high whose tip was set into a 

 cross-piece of sago-palm pith forming a T device, while into 

 this cross-piece were inserted two small nails of wood, each 

 bearing a pellet, the root of the Ealia (? the officinal ginger) ; 

 on two others, whose tops were encircled by a, rattan girdle, 

 within which several wooden wedges were driven, sharp 

 bamboo spikes (such as are stuck in the ground to wound 

 unwary travellers) were suspended by a cord ; the fourth had 

 its summit split for some length by two or three wedges of 

 wood ; the fifth, girdled with a rattan ring, had a piece of halia 

 inserted below a chip of wood and transfixed to the summit 

 with a peg, while the sixth was a bamboo full of water. The 

 Alefurus accompanying me said, that each pillar indicated 

 a species of retribution that would overtake the trespasser. 



Commencing our descent we reached a stream running in 

 a westerly direction, which conducted us to a few houses on the 

 margin of the Lake, which had been visited by white men but 

 three or four times in as many hundred years. 



