The husband of Aumia, a jolly fellow of thirty, was practising on a drum for the entertainment of his wife.  He said that the corpse of his grandfather, a chief, had been oiled and kept about the house until it became mummified.  This, he said, had been quite the custom.  The body was washed very thoroughly, and rubbed with cocoanut-oil.  It was laid in the sun, and members of the family appointed to turn it many times a day, so that all parts might be subjected to an even heat.  The anointing with oil was repeated several times daily.  Weeks or months of this process reduced the corpse to a mummified condition, and if it were the body of a chief it was then put in his canoe and kept for years in a ceremonial way.  But no mark was ever placed to show where the dead were buried, and there were no funeral ceremonies.  Better that none knew where the body was laid and that the chosen friends who carried it to the sepulchre forgot the spot.

In the very old days the Marquesans interred the dead secretly in the night at the foot of great trees.  Or they carried the bodies to the mountains and in a rocky hole shaded by trees covered them over and made the grave as much as possible like the surrounding soil.  The secret of the burial-place was kept inviolate.  Aumia’s husband related an instance of a man who in the darkest night climbed a supposedly inaccessible precipice carrying the body of his young wife lashed to his back, to place it carefully on a lofty shelf and descend safely.

These precautions came probably from a fear of profanation of the dead, perhaps of their being eaten by a victorious enemy.  To devastate the cemeteries and temples of the foe was an aim of every invading tribe.  It was considered that mutilating a corpse injured the soul that had fled from it.

Afraid of no living enemy nor of the sea, meeting the shark in his own element and worsting him, fearlessly enduring the thrust of the fatal spear when an accident of battle left him defenseless, the Marquesan warrior, as much as the youngest child, had an unutterable horror of their own dead and of burial-places, as of the demons who hovered about them.

Christianity has made no change in this, for it, too, is encumbered with such fears.  Who of us but dreads to pass a graveyard at night, though even to ourselves we deny the fear?  Banshees, werwolves and devils, the blessed candles lit to keep away the Evil One, or even to guard against wandering souls on certain feasts of the dead, were all part of my childhood.  So to the Marquesan are the goblins that cause him to refuse to go into silent places alone at night, and often make him cower in fear on his own mats, a pareu over his head, in terror of the unknown.

But death when it comes to him now is nothing, or it is a going to sleep at the end of a sad day.  Aumia, eating her burial meats and looking with pleasure at her coffin, carefully and beautifully built by her husband’s hands, smiled at me as serenely as a child.  But the melancholy sound of her coughing followed me up the trail to the House of the Golden Bed.