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THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE 21
Lambumbu, Deacon gave the following gloomy but interesting
picture :—-
" I well remember the nimasian [the death feast] of an old
man, Kulcan, at Lowag. Kukan died, during an epidemic of
Spanish influenza, of pneumonia. This epidemic swept through
the district like a veritable plague. Typically it began with a
bronchial cough, heaviness, and often severe pain in the head,
temperature 100° to 101°, often too, transient pains in various
parts of the body, great weakness. In the more fatal type this
led to what was apparently pneumonia . . . severe catching pain
in one or both lungs when breathing, pain in arm-pit and shoulder
and sometimes down to the hip on the same side, rising ternpera~
ture, delirium, very diï¬Åicult breathing, with a kind of regurgitating
during breathing, ending in death. We heard ï¬Årst of this epidemic
on the East Coast (where in one village of twenty inhabitants, six
had died in two days) with the news that it would shortly reach
thc West. The ï¬Årst symptoms throughout Lambumbu district
were the universal cough and pain in the head. All the men
in Liï¬Åwag caught one or other of these. At the time I was treating
the chief, Wulvanu, as best l could, for severe pain in, apparently,
the spinal column. . . . When the epidemic arrived he was
considerably better, being able to walk about and feeling the
pain no longer. A few days after the epidemic anived, however,
Kukan began to develop its more advanced symptoms. This
seemed to be the sign for a general panic. All the men abandoned
the village to the pigs, dogs, and women, and fled to the bush,
where each one went off by himself and chose a sheltered spot,
and throwing together a few houghs and coconut fronds for a
shelter, lay for three of four days, thinking hour by hour, alone
with his sickness.
“Kukan, however, began now to grow worse; it bet-ame
necessary to nurse him. A more solid communal shelter was put
2-H by those who were comparatively well, an oven-hole dug, and
camped out under this shelter, taking tums at supporting
Kukan. . . . So a pitiable, forlorn group, relieved only by the
bitter ironic merriment of its more vivacious members, the
continued for a couple of days at the end of which Kukan diedi
Before this, the chief (Wulvanu) had returned alone to his house
in the village, with all his fonner symptoms aggravated and
much weaker, not having eaten for about a week. The death of
Kukan was the signal for a general return again to the village,
where fl.‘lt6.0ld chief was lying sick and almost delirious, the only
man in i . ’
Only in the north, in the territory of the Big Nambas, was
native life being carried on in anything like a normal way.
It must not be thought, however, that depopulation has been
the only cause for the decay of Malekulan culture.