A FUNERAL PROCESSION. 
201 
sleep but that of death. As the bearers advance, the 
dead man 
“ Moves and nods his head ; 
But the motion comes from the bearers’ tread, 
As the body borne aloft in state, 
Sways with the impulse of its own dead weight.” * 
As the procession moves onward, the relatives of 
the deceased occasionally stop and kiss the body, and 
then renew their uproar with tenfold energy. Upon 
reaching the place of sepulture, the din ceases while 
the corpse is prepared for the last offices of kindred 
devotion. The grave is constructed by sinking a 
hole in the earth, about five feet deep and three 
wide, which is the entrance to a lateral chamber cut 
from the bottom of the cavity with which it forms a 
right angle. In this chamber the body is carefully 
placed in the same erect posture in which it was 
brought to this last abode of its mortality. As soon 
as it is deposited in that narrow dwelling where the 
supremacy of death is so awfully recognized, the con- 
secrated rice and sacred water from the Ganges — which, 
like the widow’s barrel of meal and cruise of oil, are 
supposed to be inconsumable— are placed before it, each 
in a small earthen vessel, in order that the corpse 
may be sustained with food proper for its nourishment 
in its state of separation from the living, until the 
dominion of death and time shall cease, and “ life and 
immortality be brought to light.” Before the inter- 
ment, the well-known mark of the deceased’s caste 
is carefully painted upon his forehead, in order that 
Siva may distinguish a true worshipper among those 
* Curse of Kehama. 
