CLIMBING UP TO HEAVEN. 
367 
know their former friends or relatives. I have 
myself often been asked, with seriousness and 
earnestness, who, among the Europeans, were their 
fathers, their mothers, and their other relatives, and 
how it is that the dead were so ignorant, or so for- 
getful, as not to know their friends when they again 
returned to the earth. 
One old native informed me, that all blacks, when 
dead, go up to the clouds, where they have plenty 
to eat and drink ; fish, birds, and game of all kinds, 
with weapons and implements to take them. He 
then told me, that occasionally individuals had been 
up to the clouds, and had come back, but that such 
instances were very rare ; his own mother, he said, 
had been one of the favoured few. Some one from 
above had let down a rope, and hauled her up by 
it ; she remained one night, and on her return, gave 
a description of what she had seen in a chaunt, or 
song, which he sung for me, but of the meaning of 
which I could make out nothing 
