The Hongu Utux, the bridge of the spirits, is the rainbow along which the Atayal dead travel to the land of the ancestors. It is a place of reckoning: only those who kept the gaga and bear the facial tattoo earned in life may set foot on it and cross in safety, while the untattooed, the cowardly and the guilty lose their footing and fall into the gulf beneath, in some tellings to be seized by a great crab or lost in the dark water. The bridge thus binds together the central concerns of Atayal life and death, tattoo, headtaking, weaving and the moral order of gaga, into a single image of judgement. The Sediq preserve the cognate hakaw utux with a comparable belief.