shouldered a stick with two bag-shaped baskets at each end. Other men had to carry the oars, paddles, rigging and sail, as these paraphernalia are always kept in the village. From one of the villages, one of the large, prismatic receptacles for food made of sticks was carried by several men right over the raybwag (coral ridge) to be offered to the chief of Omarakana as a share in the sagali. The whole village was astir, and on its outskirts, through the surrounding groves, parties from inland could be seen making their way rapidly to the shore. I left the village with a party of notables at about eight o’clock in the morning. After leaving the grove of fruit and palm trees which grows especially densely around the village of Omarakana, we entered between the two walls of green, the usual monotonous Trobriand road, which passes through the low scrub. Soon, emerging on a garden space, we could see, beyond a gentle declivity, the rising slope of the raybwag, a mixture of rank vegetation with monumental boulders of grey coral standing out here and there. Through this, the path led on, following in an intricate course between small precipices and towering outcrops, passing huge, ancient ficus trees, spreading around them their many trunks and aerial roots. At the top of the ridge, all of a sudden the blue sea shone through the foliage, and the roar of waves breaking on the reef struck our ears. Soon we found ourselves among the crowd assembled on the beach, near to the big boat-shed of Omarakana.
By about nine o’clock, everybody was ready on the beach. It was fully exposed to the Eastern sun, but this was not yet sufficiently high to drop its light right from above, and thus to produce that deadly effect of tropical mid-day, where the shadows instead of modelling out the details, blur every vertical surface and make everything dull and formless. The beach appeared bright and gaudy, and the lively brown bodies looked well against the background of green foliage and white sand. The natives were anointed with coco-nut oil, and decorated with flowers and facial paint. Large red hibiscus blossoms were stuck into their hair, and wreaths of the white, wonderfully scented butia flowers crowned the dense black mops. There was a good display of ebony carvings, sticks and lime spoons. There were decorated lime pots, and such objects of personal adornment as belts of red shell discs or of small cowrie shells, nose sticks (very rarely used nowadays), and other articles so well known to everybody from ethnological collections in museums, and usually called “ceremonial,” though, as said above (Chapter III, Div. III) the description “objects of parade” would be much more in agreement with the correct meaning of the words.
Such popular festivities as the one just being described are the occasions on which these objects of parade, some of which astonish us by their artistic perfection, appear in native life. Before I had opportunities to see savage art in actual display, in its proper, “living” setting, there seemed to me always to exist some incongruity between the artistic finish of such objects and the general crudity of savage life, a crudity marked precisely on the æsthetic side. One imagines greasy, dirty, naked bodies, moppy hair