The fist lessons that I learned were never to intrude4 my own intelligence upon him, and to have patience, the patience that waits for hours and years for the links in the long chain to be pieced together. A casual soul, he knows no urgency. Yesterday and today and tomorrow are all the same to him. Naturalness in white company comes from long familiarity. Only when you are part of the landscape that he knows and loves will he accord you the compliment of living his normal life and taking no notice of you.
His unconscious confidences are by far the most valuable. Most of my data is the gradual compiling of many, many years. Quite often I have chanced upon the clue to problems long after I had given them up. Of unfinished legends begun at Broome and Beagle Bay in the north-west, I have written the finale at Ooldea in the centre. Some of the straying threads of my ethnological study are still in mid-air. I shall perhaps never find their source, nor know their conclusion. Only in God’s good time will you begin to understand the riddle5 of the native mind. It is the study, not of a year or two of field work, but of a whole lifetime.
Westward6 and eastward7 and northward8 in these northern areas I went, constantly travelling to and fro, and hither and thither9 by train, or buggy, or horse. I alighted whenever I saw a native and made friends with his little group. I lived their lives, not mine. Whenever I camped with them, they did not trouble about clothing of any kind, innocent and natural as children. Was I not their ancestral grandmother, spirit rather than woman?
Everywhere was evidence of the encroachment10 of the circumcised groups upon the uncircumcised. I found that the Bibbulmun area had once been far greater, and had gradually narrowed through the centuries, as the first hordes11 were driven to the coast. From Jurien Bay northward to Ballaballa, along a narrow strip of coastline, were certain isolated12 uncircumcised groups, each having its own initiation13 ceremonies, but always adhering to the fundamental totemic and marriage laws. These groups called themselves Ingada, and the Aggardee, or circumcised, tribes bordering them would make contact with the families, and then take the boys away to be circumcised. The Ingada kept their laws, but they gave their boys under compulsion. As civilization went on, their little spaces narrowed, and their marriage laws were no longer possible. I met the derelict members of about forty groups, and each had the same sad story to tell me. The tribes of Geraldton, within twenty years of the white man’s coming had been absorbed, for the second hordes had reached the coast all round them, under the protection of the white settlers.
The four-class marriages between Boorong and Banaka, Kaimera and Paljera, as here they were called, had been completely broken down in both the centre and the central west for centuries. The beginning of the breach14 was probably when certain young men, tired of waiting for their affianced wives to grow up, had seized their father’s sisters, who were their potential mothers-inlaw, and run away with them into the vast scarcely-occupied areas south and south-east of Nullagine, extending down to near the Nullarbor Plain. There they sat down beside a water-hole and either established a little group, or merged16 into the nomad17 tribes they met. The children followed the example of the fathers. Irregularity crept over until there was not one straight marriage among the thousands I encountered. Intercourse18 was not only promiscuous19 but incestuous. The old men would speak to me about these things as though I were a native.
Often I came upon a mixture of northern, eastern and south-western families gathered in one group and living amicably20 together, and, in one instance, a group of Bibbulmun in the centre of the Aggardee. I also found traces of types distinctly Dutch. When Pelsart marooned21 two white criminals on the mainland of Australia in 1627, these Dutchmen had probably been allowed to live with the natives, and it may, be that they and their progeny22 journeyed far along the river-highways, for I found these types as far out as the head-waters of the Gascoyne and the Murchison. There was no mistaking the flat heavy Dutch face, curly fair hair, and heavy stocky build.
Baby cannibalism23 was rife24 among these central-western peoples, as it is west of the border in Central Australia. In one group, east of the Murchison and Gascoyne Rivers, every woman who had had a baby had killed and eaten it, dividing it with her sisters, who, in turn, killed their children at birth and returned the gift of food, so that the group had not preserved a single living child for some years. When the frightful25 hunger for baby meat overcame the mother before or at the birth of the baby, it was killed and cooked regardless of sex. Division was made according to the ancestral food-laws. I cannot remember a case where the mother ate a child she had allowed, at the beginning, to live.
I obtained a photograph of this group unexpectedly. I was camped among the Meekatharra tribes, some distance from the township, devoting myself to the aged26 and the ailing27, engaged mostly in compiling dialects and map-making, with the aid of the natives. (The map-making method was simple. I gathered the men of the different groups about me, and with a sheet of brown paper and a pencil, constructed an early history of their home waters and wanderings. I would start from a given point-Meekatharra, Peak Hill or Wiluna-plan out the district according to its natural features, mark off the waters, put down the tracks to and from fathers’ camps and grandfathers’ camps, denoting localities with their native names by means of elementary questions as to where they “sat down.” Distances were calculated from “how many sleeps?” allowing so many miles to a day’s journey. I have many of these maps in my possession, an intensive geography covering hundreds of square miles, and invaluable28 in marking the tribes and groups and countries and permanent and other waters of the west of West Australia before it was peopled by whites.)
One evening, an hour or so after dusk, I sensed something moving in the low scrub to northward. Without appearing to take any notice, I perceived a number of native men approaching quietly, all decorated, and carrying their spears and spear-throwers. I looked over to the Meekatharra camp, which had become strangely silent. The fires were banked and covered with sand, and there was no stir of life-sure sign of fear of the stranger. I went quietly on making my toast and tea.
The men came slowly closer, still hiding behind the trees. They stopped at some little distance. Without looking up, I called, “Come on, boggali! (grandchildren). Come to the fire You must be cold!” At last eight men came into the clearing, and very sheepishly approached, saying nothing.
“Sit down and have some food,” I invited them. “Where are your women?” They gave a short call, as one would call a dog. Several women came out of the bushes. My supper had, of course, to go by the board. Bringing out flour and water, I started them making dampers, and with a casual question or two learned that they had just come from far beyond Peak Hill to see me. Bush telegraph had sent the news of my arrival at Meekatharra, and they had walked over ninety miles, with little food on the way, to see kabbarli.
Next morning I took them over to the camp and made the introductions. There was armed neutrality for a while, every man with his spear in readiness, and indeed there were, after I had left them, a few thigh-spearings in revenge for the unlawful appropriation29 of a woman at one time or the other, but no serious trouble.
In this comparatively desolate30 country, the totems were entirely31 different from the brotherhood32 with nature and the food-totems of the Bibbulmun. Kangaroo, emu, and dingo-totems are common throughout Australia, and here, among them, I met men of the moolaiongoo, or wombat33 snake, and the goorara or prickly acacia. The goorara provided the best bamburu sticks and also the wood for the best come-back boomerangs.
The age-old feud34 of the blood and lice totem groups was told to me in the Leonora and Laverton areas. Kooloo-lice totem men-sent lice sores to the ngooba-blood totem group-and when a blood totem man or woman died, blood magic was sent back to claim a victim among the lice men. As far as I could ascertain35, the blood totem groups were tubercular, and, a gruesome and curious fact, this was one of the few totems that might be “passed on” regardless of heredity. When I first visited this group area, Muri and Jinguroo, two lice men, had been arrested for the murder of a blood man and sent to Rottnest Island prison. At that time there were very few of either group living. The blood totem men had been more successful in passing on their magic than the lice men. The area of the groups was in the broken country north-west of Laverton. None of these natives had been in contact with any white people until the end of the twentieth century. I found one lice woman near Meekatharra far north-west of her home ground. She had escaped the blood magic, but all her fathers and brothers had died of it.
These two groups are typical of the group systems of the circumcised people, which maintains armed neutrality except during the assemblies for initiations and other ceremonies. Tales came to me of one group completely annihilating36 another with its magic, but I found only one instance of annexation37 of a group area whose owners had been killed by their more powerful neighbouring group. An area bereft38 of its owners is “orphaned” land and no neighbouring group would think of annexing40 it, but when the last Meekatharra man died a Lake Way native, strong in his magic, annexed41 that group area, while still keeping his hold on his own Lake Way ground.
One evening, as we sat round the camp-fire, this native, Jaal, by a weird42 aboriginal43 sleight44 of hand, apparently45 from his stomach produced an initiation knife, and with it a piece of dark stone shot through with veins46 of galena-or was it gold? I did not know. He gave them to me. “This,” he said in his own language, “is what the white man likes, but we don’t let him come for it. The knife is from Maiamba, and it is my totem, ‘jeemarri.’”
I questioned him further, and found that the jeemarri group was the most important in the widest area that I could compass there. Jeemarri knives were peculiar47 to the region, of a hard dark flint. The shrine48 Maiamba was a secret and sacred place visited only by the older men, who are possessed49 of the magic of extracting these initiation knives from their stomachs. The surroundings of the shrine possessed a peculiarly Scottish name, Munro, and the area was called Yarnder. The jeemarri found there were bartered50 south and west and north to the confines of the continent. They were so hard and strong, and having come from the stomachs of the old men, their magic was so potent15 that they could be sold for “spears and spears and spears,” making the group a rich one and of outstanding importance.
Jaal told me that he was the last man of his group, and to me he left this shrine Maiamba, from which he and his people had headed off the white man who had come many times looking for gold. I was not to take anyone there until all of the natives who belonged to it were dead and gone, and Maiamba an orphan39 water. Jaal said he would go with me to Maiamba, but soon after this episode he was taken to Bernier Island. I showed the stone with its rich content to an assayer51. He was deeply interested.
“An excellent specimen52, Mrs. Bates,” he told me. “Seventeen ounces to the ton. Where did it come from?”
“I am not sure of the white name of the place,” I evaded53. “A native brought it in.” Jaal’s country and its Maiamba shrine lay east of Meekatharra at Lake Way, now the extensive gold mines of Wiluna, to which by right of bequest54, I am the hereditary55 heiress, for the jeemarri area is mine, by deed of gift of my last grandson there.
Along way from Peak Hill, and near a pool called Jilguna, I “sat down” with a large group, among which were many elders, and one old patriarch, Ngargala. Ngargala was nearing his end, and it was he who gave to me the magic bamburu which has been my passport among all the central circumcised tribes through the years. I shall never forget the ceremony of the presentation.
The dying man reclined upon a little slope, and I sat beside him, with the group chanting in low tones. From a bundle beside him he brought out a package of emu feathers and human hair, from which he drew a magic bamburu of fine light yellow acacia wood, exquisitely56 curved and etched, with the crude form of a woman its centrepiece.
He pointed57 to the figure and said, “That is you, kabbarli, dhoogoor kabbarli (woman of the dream-time).”
I replied quietly, “I know that, boggali (grandson),” and handed it back.
“I am old,” said Ngargala. “I give you my magic and you will keep it with your bamburu.”
As he said these words, he placed his hands upon my breast, and I placed mine on his. Then he placed the bamburu between us, with its blunted ends pressed against our bodies, and with his black hands gathered the magic of his heart and stomach, drew it slowly and firmly along the bamburu, with one closed hand at the other end to catch it and impregnate it into my breast.
At last I said, “That is all, boggali. Now I have your magic and mine. We two are strong for all time. This bamburu will never leave me. It will sit down with me daytime and night-time.”
I rose from my cramped58 position, and, emptying my bag of rations59, left the group in silence.
I never saw Ngargala again, but those of the groups who were then present would always know me, and many a time have repeated softly by way of greeting and recognition the chant that they sang during the transfer of the old man’s magic bamburu.
Always, wherever it happened to be, and without referring to the matter, I would go over and take their hands in mine and they knew I was a “mason.”
Now the heiress of an undiscovered gold mine and a repository of dream-time magic, there was yet another inheritance that came my way before I left this district. While I was at Cue, one of the natives, a man of the red ochre totem, wished to show me his home-ground, where there was still a motley little group of many families. We obtained a passage to a place called Mindoola, eighty miles away, in a dray carrying provisions to a few old miners. It was a long and arduous60 journey, for most of the way I tried to make myself comfortable sitting on a sewing machine to be delivered at some outpost station.
On the way we passed a beautiful pool full of pelicans61, and then entered the ranges. I had previously62 learned from the natives of a “stone man lying down,” a dark scoriated heap of stone boulders63 that, from one aspect, appeared to be a gigantic recumbent figure. Should strangers approach the place, according to native belief, the stone man rose in anger, and they died, for the stone sleeper64 was Barlieri, a legendary65 father.
As we approached this, I gazed upon it intently. “You see,” I said in an undertone to the native at my side, “Barlieri knows me. He knows I am coming. He is glad. He does not rise against me.” I felt the native gradually edging closer.
I was wearing, I remember, a cream holland coat and skirt. When we came to Wilgamia, the red ochre deposits, I left the man with the dray, and with my native guide went up the hill and into the hill, cut about in rough excavations66.
In and out and up and down through greasy67 haematite we went, sometimes seeing the remains68 of a tiny fire. This hill has been a source of much-valued red ochre for perhaps centuries, for far away in the north I had seen this greasy haematite from Wilgamia in the south.
Everywhere the black fellow crawled I followed, until we came to the place they had been digging for the last two or three hundred years. There, with a piece of flint, he cut me a piece, marking his own forehead with it before he gave it to me. “When I finish, all finish,” he said. “Your Wilgamia now.”
I came out a Woman in Red. There was not an inch of me that had not been ochred all over, even my face and hands were smeared69 with the greasy stuff.
点击收听单词发音
1 dealing | |
n.经商方法,待人态度 | |
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2 anthropologist | |
n.人类学家,人类学者 | |
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3 logics | |
n.逻辑(学)( logic的名词复数 );逻辑学;(做某事的)道理;推理方法 | |
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4 intrude | |
vi.闯入;侵入;打扰,侵扰 | |
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5 riddle | |
n.谜,谜语,粗筛;vt.解谜,给…出谜,筛,检查,鉴定,非难,充满于;vi.出谜 | |
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6 westward | |
n.西方,西部;adj.西方的,向西的;adv.向西 | |
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7 eastward | |
adv.向东;adj.向东的;n.东方,东部 | |
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8 northward | |
adv.向北;n.北方的地区 | |
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9 thither | |
adv.向那里;adj.在那边的,对岸的 | |
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10 encroachment | |
n.侵入,蚕食 | |
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11 hordes | |
n.移动着的一大群( horde的名词复数 );部落 | |
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12 isolated | |
adj.与世隔绝的 | |
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13 initiation | |
n.开始 | |
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14 breach | |
n.违反,不履行;破裂;vt.冲破,攻破 | |
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15 potent | |
adj.强有力的,有权势的;有效力的 | |
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16 merged | |
(使)混合( merge的过去式和过去分词 ); 相融; 融入; 渐渐消失在某物中 | |
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17 nomad | |
n.游牧部落的人,流浪者,游牧民 | |
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18 intercourse | |
n.性交;交流,交往,交际 | |
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19 promiscuous | |
adj.杂乱的,随便的 | |
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20 amicably | |
adv.友善地 | |
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21 marooned | |
adj.被围困的;孤立无援的;无法脱身的 | |
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22 progeny | |
n.后代,子孙;结果 | |
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23 cannibalism | |
n.同类相食;吃人肉 | |
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24 rife | |
adj.(指坏事情)充斥的,流行的,普遍的 | |
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25 frightful | |
adj.可怕的;讨厌的 | |
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26 aged | |
adj.年老的,陈年的 | |
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27 ailing | |
v.生病 | |
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28 invaluable | |
adj.无价的,非常宝贵的,极为贵重的 | |
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29 appropriation | |
n.拨款,批准支出 | |
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30 desolate | |
adj.荒凉的,荒芜的;孤独的,凄凉的;v.使荒芜,使孤寂 | |
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31 entirely | |
ad.全部地,完整地;完全地,彻底地 | |
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32 brotherhood | |
n.兄弟般的关系,手中情谊 | |
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33 wombat | |
n.袋熊 | |
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34 feud | |
n.长期不和;世仇;v.长期争斗;世代结仇 | |
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35 ascertain | |
vt.发现,确定,查明,弄清 | |
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36 annihilating | |
v.(彻底)消灭( annihilate的现在分词 );使无效;废止;彻底击溃 | |
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37 annexation | |
n.吞并,合并 | |
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38 bereft | |
adj.被剥夺的 | |
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39 orphan | |
n.孤儿;adj.无父母的 | |
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40 annexing | |
并吞( annex的现在分词 ); 兼并; 强占; 并吞(国家、地区等) | |
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41 annexed | |
[法] 附加的,附属的 | |
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42 weird | |
adj.古怪的,离奇的;怪诞的,神秘而可怕的 | |
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43 aboriginal | |
adj.(指动植物)土生的,原产地的,土著的 | |
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44 sleight | |
n.技巧,花招 | |
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45 apparently | |
adv.显然地;表面上,似乎 | |
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46 veins | |
n.纹理;矿脉( vein的名词复数 );静脉;叶脉;纹理 | |
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47 peculiar | |
adj.古怪的,异常的;特殊的,特有的 | |
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48 shrine | |
n.圣地,神龛,庙;v.将...置于神龛内,把...奉为神圣 | |
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49 possessed | |
adj.疯狂的;拥有的,占有的 | |
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50 bartered | |
v.作物物交换,以货换货( barter的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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51 assayer | |
n.试金者,分析专家 | |
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52 specimen | |
n.样本,标本 | |
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53 evaded | |
逃避( evade的过去式和过去分词 ); 避开; 回避; 想不出 | |
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54 bequest | |
n.遗赠;遗产,遗物 | |
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55 hereditary | |
adj.遗传的,遗传性的,可继承的,世袭的 | |
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56 exquisitely | |
adv.精致地;强烈地;剧烈地;异常地 | |
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57 pointed | |
adj.尖的,直截了当的 | |
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58 cramped | |
a.狭窄的 | |
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59 rations | |
定量( ration的名词复数 ); 配给量; 正常量; 合理的量 | |
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60 arduous | |
adj.艰苦的,费力的,陡峭的 | |
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61 pelicans | |
n.鹈鹕( pelican的名词复数 ) | |
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62 previously | |
adv.以前,先前(地) | |
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63 boulders | |
n.卵石( boulder的名词复数 );巨砾;(受水或天气侵蚀而成的)巨石;漂砾 | |
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64 sleeper | |
n.睡眠者,卧车,卧铺 | |
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65 legendary | |
adj.传奇(中)的,闻名遐迩的;n.传奇(文学) | |
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66 excavations | |
n.挖掘( excavation的名词复数 );开凿;开凿的洞穴(或山路等);(发掘出来的)古迹 | |
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67 greasy | |
adj. 多脂的,油脂的 | |
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68 remains | |
n.剩余物,残留物;遗体,遗迹 | |
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69 smeared | |
弄脏; 玷污; 涂抹; 擦上 | |
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