Note (return) — LECTURE IX

The road to Adiri or deadland is fairly well known, and the people can point to many landmarks on it. For example, in the island of Paho there is a tree called dani, under which the departing spirits sit down and weep. When they have cried their fill and rubbed their poor tear-bedraggled faces with mud, they make little pellets of clay and throw them at the tree, and anybody can see for himself the pellets sticking to the branches. It is true that the pellets resemble the nests of insects, but this resemblance is only fortuitous. Near the tree is a rocking stone, which the ghosts set in motion, and the sound that they make in so doing is like the muffled roll of a drum. And while the stone rocks to and fro with a hollow murmur, the ghosts dance, the men on one side of the stone and the women on the other. Again at Mabudavane, where the Mawata people have gardens, you may sometimes hear, in the stillness of night, the same weird murmur, which indicates the presence of a ghost. Then everybody keeps quiet, the children are hushed to silence, and all listen intently. The murmur continues for a time and then ends abruptly in a splash, which tells the listeners that the ghost has leaped over the muddy creek. Further on, the spirits come to Boigu, where they swim in the waterhole and often appear to people in their real shape. But after Boigu the track of the ghosts is lost, or at least has not been clearly ascertained. The spirit world lies somewhere away in the far west, but the living are not quite sure of the way to it, and they are somewhat vague in their accounts of it. There is no difference between the fate of the good and the fate of the bad in the far country; the dead meet the friends who died before them; and people who come from the same village probably live together in the same rooms of the long house of the ghosts. However, some native sceptics even doubt whether there is such a place as Adiri at all, and whether death may not be the end of consciousness to the individual.354