objects into the body. Fortunately some men know magic by which to extract such objects. These men, of course, according to the general rule of sorcery, can also inflict the same ailments. In olden days, the tokway gave both the harmful and beneficent magic to some men, and ever since, this form of sorcery and of concomitant healing have been handed on from one generation to another.
Let us return to our canoe, however. After the rite has been performed, the tree is felled. In olden days, when stone implements were used, this must have been a laborious process, in which a number of men were engaged in wielding the axe, and others in re-sharpening the blunted or broken blades. The old technique was more like nibbling away the wood in small chips, and it must have taken a long time to cut out a sufficiently deep incision to fell the tree. After the tree is on the ground, the preliminary trimming is done on the spot. The branches are lopped off, and the log of appropriate length is made out of the tree. This log is cut into the rough shape of a canoe, so as to make it as light as possible, for now it has to be pulled to the village or to the beach.
The transporting of the log is not an easy task, as it has to be taken out of the uneven, rocky raybwag, and then pulled along very bad roads. Pieces of wood are put on the ground every few metres, to serve as slips on which the log can more easily glide than on the rocks and uneven soil. In spite of that, and in spite of the fact that many men are summoned to assist, the work of pulling the log is very heavy. The men receive food in payment for it. Pig flesh is cooked and distributed with baked yams; at intervals during the work they refresh themselves with green coco-nut drinks and with sucking sugar cane. Gifts of such food, given during work in payment of communal labour, are called puwaya. To describe how heavy the work sometimes is, the native will say, in a characteristically figurative manner:
“The pig, the coco drinks, the yams are finished, and yet we pull—very heavy!”
In such cases the natives resort to a magical rite which makes the canoe lighter. A piece of dry banana leaf is put on top of the log. The owner or builder beats the log with a bunch of dry lalang grass and utters the following spell:
Kaymomwa’u Spell. “Come down, come down, defilement by contact with excrement! Come down, defilement by contact with refuse! Come down, heaviness! Come down, rot! Come down fungus! …” and soon, invoking a number of deteriorations to leave the log, and then a number of defilements and broken taboos. In other words, the heaviness and slowness, due to all these magical causes, are thrown out of the log.
This bunch of grass is then ritually thrown away. It is called momwa’u, or the “heavy bunch.” Another handful of the long lalang grass, seared and dry, is taken, and this is the gagabile, the “light bunch,” and with this the canoe is again beaten. The meaning of the rite is quite plain: the first bunch takes into it the heaviness of the log, and the second imparts lightness to it. Both spells also express this meaning in plain terms. The second spell, recited with the gagabile bunch, runs thus: