stormed the village which then existed at Naivila, and one of them, while scaling the trenches I have mentioned, unwittingly dropped his masi. In the flurry of the onslaught he picked it up and threw it aside, and it lighted on Ratu. This man subsequently became leprous, it is said, in consequence.
The leprous woman, Mereani, wife of the turaga in koro at Navasa, whom I examined, had her plantation within a few yards of Ratu, among the yavus of Naivila, and is stated to have acquired the disease by working in his neighbourhood. The surroundings are all tabu.
Katalewe's history was more interesting. He dwelt, as already mentioned, on a plot of land belonging to the Na Vokai mataqali, and called Na Qavoka. Na Qavoka is also the proper and sacred name of all the Toga district, by which it shares in feasts, or its turns at yaqona ceremonies and solevus are called out; but it applies specially to the Navokai tribal land. Katalewe is described as having been about the size of a large orange or a small shaddock, very round and smooth, ash-coloured, homogeneous in substance, and unlike other stones in the neighbourhood, of which, being in a tidal part of the delta formed of clayey alluvium overlying old mangrove swamps, there are but very few of any sort. The people could not say whether Katalewe originally came down the river from the mountains, or whether he might have been brought over from Kadavu or not. His origin was unknown; and he had always been vested in the family in question, which is now without a successor, but is represented in the person of one Karolaini, a married woman, about forty years of age, living at Lukia, whom I visited a few days later at that village.[1]
- ↑ When a girl, this woman developed leprosy, which was always in her family, she says; and her father, Totokea, died a long time ago, a leper himself. Karolaini's disease attacked principally her feet; and she lost all the phalanges of three toes successively from the left foot. She had also a well-
