The great sickness sits aloft, Their voices sound hoarsely, They fall and lie helpless and pitiable, Our god Ndengei is put to shame, Our own sicknesses have been thrust aside, The strangling-cord is a noble thing,[86] They fall prone; they fall with the sap still in them. * * * * * A lethargy has seized upon the chiefs, How terrible is the sickness! We do not live, we do not die, Our bodies ache; our heads ache, Many die, a few live on, The strangling-cord brings death to many, The _malo_ round their bellies rots away, Our women groan in their despair, The _liku_ knotted round them they do not loose, Hark to the creak of the strangling-cords, The spirits flow away like running water, _ra tau e_. The strangers never left Oneata alive. One tradition ascribes their death to the pestilence, another to the vengeance of the men of Levuka, and as the natives believed them to have brought the scourge, we may accept the more tragic of the two. At any rate, though various strange plunder from the wreck was carried westward to Mbau, there is no record of any foreigner accompanying them. It is not certain that this was the only visitation of the epidemic called _lila_. The traditions are so confused, and the versions so different in detail, that there is some reason to believe either that there were two visitations or that infection travelled so slowly that the disease only reached the western portion of the group some years after it had decimated the islands to the eastward. The traditional poetry of every district records the disease, and there are several data that enable us to fix the visitation within the limits of a few years. Most accounts refer to the appearance of a large comet with three tails, the centre tail coloured red and the outer white, that it rose just before dawn and was visible for thirty-seven nights in succession. Here is the native account of it:-- Sleeping in the night I suddenly awake, The voice of the pestilence is borne to me, uetau, I go out and wander abroad, _uetau_, It is near the breaking of the dawn, _uetau_, Behold a forked star, _uetau_, We whistle with astonishment as we gaze at it, _uetau_, What can it portend? _uetau_, Does it presage the doom of the chiefs? _e e_.