the comparison may be carried through. Low races and high, in region after region, can point out the very spot whence the flitting souls start to travel toward their new home. At the extreme western cape of Vanua Levu, a calm and solemn place of cliff and forest, the souls of the Fijian dead embark for the judgement-seat of Ndengei, and thither the living come in pilgrimage, thinking to see their ghosts and gods.[1] The Baperi of South Africa will venture to creep a little way into their cavern of Marimatlé, whence men and animals came forth into the world, and whither souls return at death.[2] In Mexico the cavern of Chalchatongo led to the plains of paradise, and the Aztec name of Mictlan, 'Land of the Dead,' now Mitla, keeps up the remembrance of another subterranean temple which opened the way to the sojourn of the blessed.[3] How naturally a dreary place, fit rather for the dead than the living, suggests the thought of an entrance to the land of the departed, is seen in the fictitious travels known under the name of Sir John Mandevill, where the description of the Vale Perilous, adapted from the terrible valley which Friar Odoric had seen full of corpses and heard resound with strange noise of drums, has this appropriate ending: 'This vale es full of deuilles and all way has bene; and men saise in that cuntree that thare es ane entree to hell.'[4] In more genuine folklore, North German peasants still remember on the banks of the swampy Drömling the place of access to the land of departed souls.[5] To us Englishmen the shores of lake Avernus, trodden daily by our tourists, are more familiar than the Irish analogue of the place, Lough Derg, with its cavern entrance of St. Patrick's Purgatory leading down to the awful world below. The mass of mystic details
- ↑ Williams, 'Fiji,' vol. i. p. 239; Seemann, 'Viti,' p. 398.
- ↑ Arbousset and Daumas, p. 347; Casalis, p. 247.
- ↑ Brasseur, 'Mexique,' vol. iii. p. 20, &c.
- ↑ See 'The Buke of John Mandeuill,' 31, edited by Geo. F. Warner, published by the Roxburghe Club, 1889; Yule, 'Cathay,' Hakluyt Soc. [Note to 3rd ed.]
- ↑ Wuttke, 'Volksaberglaube,' p. 215. Other cases in Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. pp. 58, 369, &c.
