only slit the flap of one of
his ears, and the trickling blood bedabbles his body. Meantime with the
hoarse cries of the men are mingled the weeping and wailing, the shrill
screams and lamentations of the women; while above all the din and
uproar rises the booming sound of the shell trumpets blown to carry the
tidings of death to all the villages in the neighbourhood. But gradually
the wild tumult dies away into silence. Grief or the simulation of it
has exhausted itself: the people grow calm; they sit down, they smoke or
chew betel, while some engage in the last offices of attention to the
dead.[444]

[Sidenote: Hypocritical character of these demonstrations, which are
intended to deceive the ghost.]

A civilised observer who witnessed such a scene of boisterous
lamentation, but did not know the natives well, might naturally set down
all these frantic outbursts to genuine sorrow, and might enlarge
accordingly on the affectionate nature of savages, who are thus cut to
the heart by the death of any one of their acquaintance. But the
missionary who knows them better assures us that most of these
expressions of mourning and despair are a mere blind to deceive and
soothe the dreaded ghost of the deceased into a comfortable persuasion
that he is fondly loved and sadly missed by his surviving relatives and
friends. This view of the essential hypocrisy of the lamentations is
strongly confirmed by the threats which sick people will sometimes utter
to their attendants. "If you don't take better care of me," a man will
sometimes say, "and if you don't do everything you possibly can to
preserve my valuable life, my ghost will serve you out." That is why
friends and relations are so punctilious in paying visits of respect and
condolence to the sick. Sometimes the last request which a dying man
addresses to his kinsfolk is that they will kill this or that sorcerer
who has killed him; and he enforces the injunction by threats of the
terrible things he will do to them in his disembodied state if they fail
to avenge his death on his imaginary murderer. As all the relatives of a
dead man stand in fear of his ghost, the body may not be buried until
all of them have had an opportunity of paying their respects to it. If,
as sometimes happens, a corpse is interred before a relative can arrive
from a distance, he will on arrival break out into reproaches and
upbraidings against the grave-diggers for exposing him to the wrath of
the departe