BURYING-BEETLES: THE BURIAL 75 



Beetle who has only one leg left entire. With this odd 

 limb and the stumps of the others lamentably tattered, 

 scaly with vermin, he rows himself, as it were, over the 

 dusty surface. A comrade emerges, one better off for 

 legs, who finishes the cripple and cleans out his abdomen. 

 So my thirteen remaining Necrophori end their days, 

 half-devoured by their companions, or at least shorn of 

 several limbs. The pacific relations of the outset are 

 succeeded by cannibalism. 



History tells us that certain peoples, the Massagetse 

 and others, used to kill their aged folk in order to spare 

 them the miseries of senility. The fatal blow on the 

 hoary skull was in their eyes an act of filial piety. The 

 Necrophori have their share of these ancient barbarities. 

 Full of days and henceforth useless, dragging out a weary 

 existence, they mutually exterminate one another. Why 

 prolong the agony of the impotent and the imbecile? 



The Massagetse might invoke, as an excuse for their 

 atrocious custom, a dearth of provisions, which is an evil 

 counselor; not so the Necrophori, for, thanks to my 

 generosity, victuals are superabundant, both beneath the 

 soil and on the surface. Famine plays no part in this 

 slaughter. Here we have the aberration of exhaustion, 

 the morbid fury of a life on the point of extinction. As 

 is generally the case, work bestows a peaceable disposition 

 on the grave-digger, while inaction inspires him with per- 

 verted tastes. Having no longer anything to do he breaks 

 his fellow's limbs, eats him up, heedless of being muti- 

 lated or eaten up himself. This is the ultimate deliver- 

 ance of verminous old age. 



