ou may
in one day's journey pass several of these signs of haunted places,
of either or both sorts, within a comparatively short distance of one
another. The hole in which the people put their hands may not have
originally existed, and may have been produced by the oft-repeated
pressure of hands on the ground as natives passed the haunted spot;
but on this point I am unable to make any statement. Nor have I
been able to ascertain what the difference, if any, is, or has been,
between the places where they put grass and those in which they merely
press the hands.

I found no evidence of any general idea of supernatural powers being
possessed by natural inanimate objects, such as rivers or rocks; but,
as already stated, fishers are in the habit of addressing the stream
in supplication for fish, and it is possible there are other examples
of the same sort of thing, which I did not discover.

Magic or sorcery, and those who practise it, and incantations and
charms, and those who supply charms, are naturally associated with
either ghosts or spirits, or both. Among the Mafulu people they are,
I was assured, associated solely with spirits, and not with ghosts;
and, though I have no confirmatory evidence of the accuracy of this
statement, I can only in these notes assume that it is correct. It
may well be, however, that in the minds of the people themselves the
distinction between the ghost of a person who has lived and died and
the spirit which has never lived in visible human form is not really
quite clearly defined; or that powers which are now regarded by them
as spirits have had an origin, possibly long ago, in what were then
believed to be ghosts. I shall revert to this point at a later stage.

Sorcery.

The Mafulu magic men or sorcerers are different from those of the
Mekeo plains. There is not among the Mafulu, as there is in Mekeo,
a large body of powerful professional sorcerers, who are a source of
constant terror to the other people of their own villages, and are
yet to a certain extent relied upon and desired by those people as
a counterpoise to the powers of sorcerers of other villages; and a
Mafulu native, unless prevented by a fear of outside hostility in
no way connected with the supernatural, will travel alone outside
his own community in a way in which fear of the sorcerers would
make a Mekeo native unwilling to do so. The Mafulu sorcerers are a
somewhat less powerful people; but they claim, and are supp