The first person who stepped over the image or
passed by it would catch the disease. Sometimes the effigy was made
out of a plantain-flower tied up so as to look like a person; it was
used in the same way as the clay figure. But the use of images for
this maleficent purpose was a capital crime; any person caught in
the act of burying one of them in the public road would surely have
been put to death.
In the western district of the island of Timor, when men or women
are making long and tiring journeys, they fan themselves with leafy
branches, which they afterwards throw away on particular spots where
their forefathers did the same before them. The fatigue which they
felt is thus supposed to have passed into the leaves and to be left
behind. Others use stones instead of leaves. Similarly in the Babar
Archipelago tired people will strike themselves with stones,
believing that they thus transfer to the stones the weariness which
they felt in their own bodies. They then throw away the stones in
places which are specially set apart for the purpose.
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