[Note: this transcription was produced by an automatic OCR engine]

154 WITH NATIVES IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC

piled on top and covered with more leaves. Food
cooked in this way is done in three or four hours, so
that the “stoves” are usually opened in the afternoon,
and enormous quantities eaten on the spot, while the
rest is put in baskets to take home. The amount
a native can eat at one sitting is tremendous, and one
can actually watch their stomachs swell as the meal
proceeds. Violent indigestion is generally the conse-
quence of such a feast. On the whole, no one seemed
to be thinking much of the dead man in whose
honour it was given,——such things are said to happen
in civilized countries as well.

I stayed in this village for another day, and many
chiefs from the neighbourhood came to consult me,
always complaining of the one thing—poison. Each
secretly accused the others, each wanted me to try
my glass on all the others. I did not like my reputa-
tion of being a magician at all, as it made the people
still more suspicious of me and more afraid of my
instruments and my camera.

These so-called chiefs were rather more intelligent
than the average. Most of them had worked for
whites at one time, and learned to speak pidgin-
English; but they were as superstitious as anyone
else, and certainly greater rogues. They were naked
and dirty, but some had retained some traces of
civilization, one, for instance, always took off his old
felt hat very politely, and made quite a civilized bow;
he must have been in Nouméa in former days.

There was no leprosy or elephantiasis here, but
a great deal of tuberculosis, and very few children,