Note 5 — CONTENTS. (continued 2)

In taking the corpse to be hidden,5 it is done by two or three of his friends; not by many people. The burial is done at night, however, not in the day time. In digging the grave, it is dug round like a banana hole. The usual depth of the grave is up to one’s waist, that is, up to the loin of a man. In the olden time, this grave was called a pahee (smooth place). Upon digging, take the dirt from the grave to another place in a fine mat, or a gourd, else the tracks would be shown. Should it be a new house, the friends of the dead would dig from the outside till they reached within,6 without the house owner knowing anything about it. The people thought that if the burial place was known, the bones would be taken for fish hooks, and the flesh for shark bait. There are some hidden graves among the precipices; others are on plains. There is a hidden grave at Haleakala; it is called the grave of Kaawa; it is right mauka of Nuu, on Maui. This is the way the corpse is treated before being thrown into that hole. When the friend of the dead takes the corpse, he takes also what the deceased was fond of when living: If he was fond of pork, banana, or perhaps sugar-cane, etc., he takes them; and upon arriving at the grave, the friend of the deceased calls to the departed ancestors7 first buried in that grave, thus: “So and so, here comes your descendant.” If the corpse should keep falling until it drops into the water, and a rainbow appears, then it is without relatives; but the corpse who has relatives is grasped by them when the body is thrown, and is stranded on the precipice, and not dropped into the water. After the burial [they] come home and mourn.