SINGULAR MODE OF SEPULTURE. 
53 
the Shasters, Vedahs and Puranas,* than them- 
selves. 
In some districts of these mountains they have a 
most singular mode of sepulture. When a person 
dies and leaves behind him the means of paying for 
an expensive funeral, it is the practice to treat his 
corpse in a manner which most wealthy persons, I 
should imagine, would rather shrink from with 
horror than anticipate with satisfaction. They first 
carefully wash the body, and after having prepared 
it for the principal process with a variety of cere- 
monies, they cast it into a huge mortar, where they 
reduce it, bones and all, to a thick pulp, which is 
rolled up into small balls ; these are taken to a spot 
consecrated for this particular purpose, and strewed 
upon the ground, when they are instantly devoured 
by kites which always hover about these places of 
interment in great numbers. Those kites are con- 
sidered sacred by the priests, who regularly feed them, 
as to those holy men they are a source of no small 
emolument. There are certain persons appointed to 
watch these birds, lest they should be driven from 
their favourite haunts, or otherwise molested. No 
one but their accredited guardians are permitted 
to approach them, though this precaution scarcely 
seems necessary, for the superstition of the popu- 
lace is so great, that they would consider it an act 
of the most flagrant impiety to intrude upon the 
retreat of those feathered anthropophagi. To be 
“ emboweled” in the maws of the sacred kites is a 
very expensive mode of sepulture, and is entirely 
* The sacred books of the Hindoos. 
F 3 
