[107] Platform burial in one form or another is not peculiar to the Mafulu district.  It is perhaps common among many of the mountain people.  Sir William Macgregor found it in the mountains of the Vanapa watershed (Annual Report, 1897-8, pp. 22 and 23), and Dr. Seligmann regards it, I think, as a custom among the general class of what he calls “Kama-weka” (Melanesians of British New Guinea, p. 32).  Mr. J. P. Thomson records its occurrence even in the lower waters of the Kemp Welch river (British New Guinea, p. 53, and see also his further references to the matter on pp. 59 and 67).  In view of a suggestion which I make in my concluding chapter as to the possible origin of the Mafulu people, it is also interesting to note that platform or tree burial is, or used to be, adopted, for important people only, by the Semang of the Malay Peninsula and the Andamanese.  As regards the Semang, though they now employ a simple form of interment, their more honourable practice was to expose the dead in trees (Skeat and Blagden, Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula, Vol.  II., p. 89); and, though the bodies of the Pangan (East Coast Semang) lay members were buried in the ground, those of their great magicians were deposited in trees (Ibid., Vol.  II., p. 91); and apparently this was the case among the Semang as regards the bodies of chiefs (Ibid., Vol.  I., p. 587).  And concerning the Andamanese it is recorded that the skeleton of a man who, for reasons given, was believed to have been a chief was found lying on a platform of sticks placed across forks of a tree about 12 feet from the ground, a mode which was compared with the method of underground burial which had previously been met with (Transactions of the Ethnological Society, New Series, Vol.  V. p. 42).  Mr. Portman records (History of our Relations with the Andamanese, Vol.  II., p. 547) similar tree burial of two chiefs and the wife of a chief, and refers to the practice of burying underground “or, what is more honourable,” on a platform up in a tree (Ibid., Vol.  I., p. 43).  The practice is also mentioned by Mr. Man, who, after referring (The Andaman Islanders, p. 76) to underground interment and platform burial, of which “the latter is considered the more complimentary,” states (pp. 76 and 77) that a small stage is constructed of sticks and boughs about 8 to 12 feet above the ground, generally (the italics are mine) between the forked branches of some large tree, and to it the body is lashed.

[108] I have been unable to find an account of any spiritual or partly spiritual being associated with the beliefs of Papuans or Melanesians who can be regarded as being similar to Tsidibe.  Perhaps the nearest approach to him will be found in Qat of the Banks Islands, of whom much is told us by Dr. Codrington in The Melanesians, and who apparently is not regarded as having been of divine rank, but