MELANESIA AND ITS PEOPLE. 195 
no state or surroundings. Thus at Roasi, on Little Malaita, Horo- 
hanue was the alaha paine, the main chief, but he had no immediate 
retinue and lived alone with his two wives, the guardian of his ances- 
tral spirits, ‘akalo, and with the skulls of his dead in the house along 
with him. 
Roasi was composed of two parts, Upper and Lower, Roasi i haho, 
Roasii ‘ano. A teacher, Johnson Telegsem, was accepted by the peo- 
ple of Lower Roasi, acting quite independently of Horohanue, as they 
had every right to do. After two moves they made a final settlement 
at Salenga just above the bay. Then two years later Horohanue 
himself also asked for a teacher and gathered his own particular people 
together and had a school-house built. 
The two Christian villages of Roasi were only half a mile apart, with 
a ravine in between, and yet separate teachers had to be found for them, 
owing to their unwillingness to move to some one central spot where a 
permanent church and school could be built. The Mission went so far 
as to buy a site down on the beach large enough to accommodate both 
sections of the people, who numbered something over 200, but after 
Horohanue’s death petty jealousies and squabbles completely pre- 
vented any concerted action. 
At Sa‘a, an important place at the southeast end of Malaita, the 
titular chief Sinehanue was the direct descendant, twelve generations 
removed, of the chiefs who had shared in the original migration from 
the hills of Little Malaita (Codrington, Mel. Anthrop., p. 49). He 
lived apart from the majority of the people with just his own immediate 
relatives and dependents around him. Four separate villages, huu 2 
lume, collections of houses, formed what was known to the neighboring 
peoples as Sa‘a, though no one village bore the name as such, and in 
each of these there was at least one person who was reckoned as alaha 
chief. 
The greatest possible difficulty was experienced in inducing the peo- 
ples of these four villages to act in concert and assign one place as the 
site for the church and school. We had journeys all over the neigh- 
borhood looking for a neutral place and houses were begun tentatively 
in several directions in order to accelerate union. 
With very few exceptions the people inhabiting any particular dis- 
trict are always a mere handful. At Sa‘a the inhabitants of all the 
four villages numbered a little over 200, and the population of an aver- 
age Christian village in any of the large islands of the Solomons when 
all of the available people had been gathered in would seldom be much 
over 60. These villages, moreover, are several miles apart, and there 
is nothing in the nature of roads joining them, so it is plain that there 
must necessarily be a great deal of unavoidable isolation between the 
villages, and concerted action and corporate life will not be acquired 
easily. 
