hough he were a very
leper. Before he could be officially cleansed and readmitted into
decent Maori society, his clothing and furniture had to be destroyed,
and his kitchen abandoned. By such means did this--to us--ridiculous
superstition secure reverence for the dead and some avoidance of
infection. To this end the professional grave-digger and corpse-bearer
of a Maori village was _tapu_, and lived loathed and utterly apart.
Sick persons were often treated in the same way, and inasmuch as the
unlucky might be supposed to have offended the gods, the victims
of sudden and striking misfortune were treated as law-breakers and
subjected to the punishment of _Muru_ described in the last chapter.

Death in Maori eyes was not the Great Leveller, as with us. Just
as the destiny of the chief's soul was different from that of the
commoner or slave, so was the treatment of his body.

A slave's death was proverbially that of a dog, no man regarded it.
Even the ordinary free man was simply buried in the ground in a
sitting posture and forgotten. But the departure of a chief of rank
and fame, of great _mana_ or prestige, was the signal for national
mourning. With wreaths of green leaves on their heads, friends sat
round the body wailing the long-drawn cry, _Aue! Aue!_ or listening to
some funeral chant recited in his praise. Women cut themselves with
sharp sea-shells or flakes of volcanic glass till the blood ran down.
The corpse sat in state adorned with flowers and red ochre and clad in
the finest of mantles. Albatross feathers were in the warrior's
hair, his weapons were laid beside him. The onlookers joined in the
lamenting, and shed actual tears--a feat any well-bred Maori could
perform at will. Probably a huge banquet took place; then it was held
to be a truly great _tangi_. Often the wives of the departed killed
themselves in their grief, or a slave was sacrificed in his honour.
His soul was believed to mount aloft, and perhaps some star was
henceforth pointed out as his eye shining down and watching over
his tribe. The tattooed head of the dead man was usually reverently
preserved--stored away in some secret recess and brought out by the
priest to be gazed upon on high occasions. The body, placed in a
canoe-shaped coffin, was left for a time to dry on a stage or moulder
in a hollow tree. After an appointed period the bones were scraped
clean and laid away in a cavern or cleft known only to a sacred few.
They might be thrown