The reminiscence of Greek myth in Themba, the ghostly ferryman, and in the Water-of-Solace is, of course, mere coincidence. The republican sentiments of Charon find no echo in Fiji, for Themba reserved the hard-wood end of his craft for aristocratic passengers. The Water-of-Solace, too, was a more complex invention than the Water of Lethe, for the Fijians, whose emotions are transient, make their Lethe an excuse for the shortness of their mourning for the dead. "And his friends also ceased from weeping, for they straightway forgot their sorrow, and were consoled." The saga is valuable for the light that it throws on the moral ethics of the Fijians. Cowardice and idleness were the most heinous crimes; a life of rapine and a violent death were passports to the sacred mountain. A natural death was so contemned that the Shade was commanded by Taleya to re-enter the body and die respectably. This part of the story was of course devised to account for recoveries from trance and fainting fits. Life on earth was not a desirable possession. Seeing the misfortunes that overtook the spirit in its last journey, the Fijians might well have exclaimed with Claudio-- "The weariest and most loathed worldly life, Is Paradise to what we fear of death." Yet so gloomy and joyless is the prospect of a return to life that the Shades who are offered the privilege by Taleya do not all obey, so "anxious are they to reach Nakauvandra." Light is also thrown upon a fact wonderingly related by the early missionaries, that the widows of dead chiefs themselves insisted upon being strangled to his manes, although it was notorious that they did not love him. It was their good name that was at stake, for we read that when the Shade had missed his throw at the pandanus-tree, and knew therefrom that his wives would not be strangled, he went on weeping, for he had now a proof that they had been unfaithful to him in life. [Pageheader: THE ANCESTOR GOD] The religion of a primitive people springs from within them and reflects their moral qualities, and the modification that it receives from the physical character of the country in which they live is a mere colour that goes no deeper than the surface. Every turn in the "Long Road" embodies an article of social ethics. If there had been no long spur protruding from Nakauvandra into the plain the story would have been different, but the moral ethics of the race would somehow have been illustrated; the industrious and courageous would somehow have been rewarded; the man of violence would have had some advantage over the man of peace; the Shades would in some way have shown their preference for the terrors of death to the gloom of life; the idle and the cowardly would somehow have been put to shame. The Ndengei Myth