ll
disguise herself as an aged crone and hobble past, saying in a thin
cracked voice, "Don't come to me. I am an old woman." Such spots are
often stones, which the natives call child-stones because the souls of
the dead are there lying in wait for women in order to be born as
children. One such stone, for example, may be seen in the land of the
Arunta tribe near Alice Springs. It projects to a height of three feet
from the ground among the mulga scrub, and there is a round hole in it
through which the souls of dead plum-tree people are constantly peeping,
ready to pounce out on a likely damsel. Again, in the territory of the
Warramunga tribe the ghosts of black-snake people are supposed to gather
in the rocks round certain pools or in the gum-trees which border the
generally dry bed of a water-course. No Warramunga woman would dare to
strike one of these trees with an axe, because she is firmly convinced
that in doing so she would set free one of the lurking black-snake
spirits, who would immediately dart into her body. They think that the
spirits are no larger than grains of sand and that they make their way
into women through the navel. Nor is it merely by direct contact with
one of these repositories of souls, nor yet by passing near it, that
women may be gotten with child against their wish. The Arunta believe
that any malicious man may by magic cause a woman or even a child to
become a mother: he has only to go to one of the child-stones and rub it
with his hands, muttering the words, "Plenty of young women. You look
and go quickly."[114]

[Sidenote: As a rule, only the souls of persons of one particular
totemic clan are thought to congregate in one place.]

A remarkable feature in these gathering-places of the dead remains to be
noticed. The society at each of them is very select. The ghosts are very
clannish; as a rule none but people of one particular totemic clan are
supposed to for-gather at any one place. For example, we have just seen
that in the Arunta tribe the souls of dead people of the plum-tree totem
congregate at a certain stone in the mulga scrub, and that in the
Warramunga tribe the spirits of deceased persons who had black snakes
for their totem haunt certain gum-trees. The same thing applies to most
of the other haunts of the dead in Central Australia. Whether the totem
was a kangaroo or an emu, a rat or a bat, a hawk or a cockatoo, a bee or
a fly, a yam or a grass seed, the sun or the moon, fire