Sometimes two men unite to commit one of these rapes. They glide noiselessly into a neighbouring camp in the night; one of them winds round his barbed spear the hair of a sleeping _lubra_, the other points his spear at her bosom. She awakes, and dares not cry out; they take her off, bind her to a tree, and then return in the same manner to make a second capture; after that they return in triumph to their own people.[215] The captives rarely revolt, for they are, in a way, accustomed to the capture. From infancy they have been familiarised with the fate that awaits them, for the simulation of the rape is one of the games of the Australian children.[216] Later the life of a pretty Australian girl is marked by a series of plots to carry her off, and of successive rapes, which force her to pass from hand to hand, and expose her to wounds received in conflicts, and to bad treatment inflicted by the other women amongst whom she is introduced. Sometimes she is dragged very far, even hundreds of miles from the place of her birth.[217] It is the duty of the tribe to which the ravished woman belongs to avenge her, and the Australian has, after his own manner, a strong sentiment of certain obligations, which for him are moral; but more frequently, to escape too great damages, the tribes hold a meeting, and the ravisher submits to a symbolic retaliation agreed on beforehand. Armed with his little shield of bark, he takes his place at about forty yards from a group of ten warriors belonging to the aggrieved tribe, and each one of these throws two or three darts at him, which are nearly always avoided or parried. Thenceforth the offence is effaced, and peace re-established.[218] The same customs prevail among the Papuans of New Guinea. At Bali the men carry off and violate brutally the solitary women they may meet; and afterwards they agree with the tribe as to compensation.[219] In like manner, in the Fiji Isles, rape, real or simulated, was general and even glorious. A particular divinity presided over it. The ravished woman either fled to a protector or resigned herself, and then a feast given to the parents terminated the affair.[220] To be able to see in these bestial customs anything resembling marriage, one must be a prey to a fixed idea--a positive matrimonial monomania. There is here no marriage by capture, but rather slavery by capture. This is not the only method of procuring wives practised by the Australians. They often proceed pacifically by traffic, and a man acquires a wife by giving in exchange another woman of whom he has power to dispose--a sister or relative.[221] Certain tribes had also instituted a sort of regulated promiscuity--a collective marriage between all the men of one clan and all the women of another. I shall have to return to the consideration of this singular form of sexual association. For the moment I confine myself to noticing that rape is not always obligatory in Australia.