290 SEA DYAK RELIGION. 



" fused : he looks before him, and all is gloomy as night. V On 

 all sides are roads, for the ways of the dead are seventy times 

 seven. In his perplexity, he drops his human spirit form, and 

 by a stroke of ghostly energy metamorphoses himself into 

 rushing wind ; and soon makes known his presence in Hades 

 by a furious tempest which sweeps everything before it, and 

 rouses the inhabitants to enquire the cause of the unwonted 

 commotion. They are told. They must go to the land of the 

 living and fetch so and so and all his belongings. The dead 

 rejoice at the summons, and without delay collect their friends, 

 get into a boat and pull through the stygian waters ; and with 

 such force does the boat plough the lake, that all the neigh- 

 bouring fish die. Arrived at the landing place, they all make 

 an eager rush into the house, " like soldiers who fly upon the 

 " spoil ; and mad like wild pigs they seize the dead one/'' The 

 departed soul cries out in anguish at being thus violently 

 carried off; but long before the ghostly party has reached 

 their abode, it becomes reconciled to its fate. 



Thus sings the waiter, who has now done her work. She 

 has conveyed the soul to its new home, which it would never 

 reach, it is said, without her intervention ; but remain sus- 

 pended somewhere, and find rest nowhere. 



The climate necessitates a speedy interment ; but there is 

 another reason for putting their dead quickly out of sight. 

 After life is extinct, the body is no longer spoken of as a body 

 or corpse ; it is an antu, a spirit ; and to have it long with 

 them would, apart from sanitary considerations, expose them 

 to sinister ghostly influences. Some time before daylight, a 

 sufficient number of men take away the corpse wrapped in 

 mats and secured with a light framework of wood ; and as it 

 is being borne from the house, ashes are thrown after it, and a 

 water-gourd is flung and broken on the floor. The graveyard 

 is generally a small hill, or rising ground in the neighbourhood, 

 as unkempt as the surrounding forest, overshadowed by 

 towering trees, and full of an entangled undergrowth of grass, 

 climbers and thorny rotan. On coming to the cemetery, the 

 first thing done is to kill a fowl to propitiate the dread powers 

 of Hades, to whom the ground is supposed to be devoted : 

 and so strong is the need of this sacrifice felt, that no Dyak, 



