So the louse, having neither to gain nor lose, reports the conduct of his commissary and associate, and if the man has been bad, Taliakood throws him into the fire, where he is burned to ashes, and so an end of him. If he has been good, the giant speeds him on his way to a happy hunting-ground, where he can kill animals by thousands, and where the earth also yields fruits and vegetables in plenty. Here he finds a house, without having the trouble to build one, and a wife is also provided for him,--the deceased wife of some neighbor usually, although he can have his own wife if she is considerate enough to die when he does. Down here everybody is well off, though the rich, having had much pleasure in the world, have less of it than the poor. After a term of years the Tagbanua dies again and goes at once to a heaven in a deeper cave without danger from fire. Seven times he dies, each time going deeper and becoming happier, and probably gains Nirvana in the end. Occasionally a good spirit returns as a dove, and a bad one comes as a goat; indeed, a few of the bad ones are doomed to wander over the earth forever. A common belief is that the soul is absent from the body in sleep, and if death occurs then the soul is lost. "May you die sleeping" is one of the most dreadful of curses. Among the Mangyan mountaineers it is customary to desert a person who is about to die. They return after his death, carry the corpse to the forest, build a fence about it, and roof it with a thatch. These people seem to have no word for god, spirit, or future life; they do not worship either visible or unseen things, and are the most moral of the Filipinos. The lowlanders also desert their dying, and after death close all paths to the house, leave the skeleton of the defunct to be picked clean by ants, and change their names for luck. When an islander in the Calamianes province dies his friends ask the corpse where it would like to be buried, naming several places, and lifting the body after each question. When the body seems to rise lightly the dead man has said, "Yes." It may then be buried, or placed in a tree in the desired locality, with such of its belongings as the family can spare, and the mourners watch around a fire that night until all the logs are consumed. The dead man walks about in the ashes, leaving his footprints, and sometimes shows himself to his relatives. Singing and feasting follow for several nights, and the house of the dead is then abandoned. The holes in the marble cliffs of San Francisco Strait formerly contained the coffined dead of the tattooed Pintados, who sacrificed slaves at the funeral that they might attend their relatives in the next world. Fear of the spirits of these rocks was but partially overcome when a Spanish priest smashed the coffins and tumbled the bodies into the sea, for the strait is still haunted and the burial rocks are good places to keep away from after dark.