Le-hev-hev is the female Guardian Ghost of Malekula and its Small Islands, the devouring power that awaits every soul on the road of the dead. John Layard, who recorded her cult on Vao, made her central to his account of Malekulan religion: the decades-long Maki ritual cycle, with its megaliths and its slaughter of tusked boars, serves above all to ransom the celebrant's soul from her at death. In the account made famous by Layard and retold by Joseph Campbell, the ghost of the dead comes to a place where the guardian has traced a labyrinthine figure in the sand and rubbed out half of it; the ghost who knows the design completes it and passes on, while the ghost who does not is devoured. In the Seniang district of south-west Malekula, where A. B. Deacon documented the same belief, the guardian who draws the figure Nahal, 'The Path', beside a rock on the way to Wies, the land of the dead, is called Temes Savsap. The Encyclopedia of Religion notes that this being is commonly associated with the underground, caves, mazes, snakes, spiders and rats, with acts of a devouring or destructive kind, and with the failure to attain a satisfactory afterlife.