TANALA BURIAL CUSTOMS. 237 



burial-places. Most of them consisted of mounds of earth 

 surrounded by shallow trenches. Trunks of trees hollowed 

 out and shaped like troughs contained the dead bodies, and 

 were placed on the top of the mounds. These troughs or 

 coffins were fitted with movable lids. A number of small 

 platters made of banana leaves, and containing native spirits, 

 were deposited on or about the mounds. The B^tsimisaraka 

 and Bezanozano tribes seem never to bury their dead under- 

 ground, but simply enclose them in wooden coffins and expose 

 them on mounds, or place them on a rude kind of trestle fixed 

 in the ground." 



Another traveller, the Eev. J. A. Houlder, thus speaks of 

 the customs of the inhabitants at the head of Antongil Bay : 

 " The people hereabouts do not bury their dead out of their 

 sight. They put them in rude coffins made of tree trunks, 

 and arranged in some kind of order, like the tombstones in a 

 European churchyard. These receptacles for the dead are 

 usually placed in some obscure spot, in a thick shady wood, 

 or a part of the great forest. But little care is taken to 

 conceal the coffins, and no thought is apparently bestowed on 

 the extreme danger of depositing the decaying bodies of the 

 dead near the dwellings of the living." 



The, Tanala. — Among the Tanala or forest tribes in the 

 neighbourhood of Ivohitrosa, in the south-east of Madagascar, 

 the corpse of a person of importance is kept for a month before 

 burial. The face is exposed for three days ; the body is then 

 covered with a red cloth or Ichnba, some silver is put into his 

 mouth, and rings upon his hands, but none are put upon his feet, 

 that honour being reserved for kings. A month is passed 

 in watching the corpse, fat being burnt to overcome the 

 effluvium. The burial procession is accompanied with firing of 

 guns and loud wailing. Upon arriving at the grave, a man 

 stands up and cries out, addressing the spirits of the dead 

 previously buried there,—" This is what you get, but you 

 must not follow after his progeny, his grandchildren, his 

 brothers ; this is the one you have got." 



The corpse of a king is buried on the day of his death ; 

 his decease is not published abroad, but some guns are 

 broken and put along with the corpse. An image of the 



