M ach si Burial Ceremonies. 
329 
to arouse my deepest sympathy. Had it not been that the wish to attend 
the further events of the funeral ceremony were too forcibly awakened 
in me, the sounds ol lamentation and affecting' signs of sorrow would 
have driven me from the house of death. After the neighbours had given 
their grief full scope for a while, they started interpolating certain 
sorrowing refrains in between all this lively expression of their feelings : 
the one mourned that she had lost her best friend, another glorified the 
fine cotton thread that the deceased used to spin, the beautiful pottery 
that she was wont to make, and yet others related all the good qualities 
that she was possessed of, while each separate eulogy closed with the 
shudderingly expressed words “Asamanda, Asamanda (dead, dead)!” 
The men as well as the widower Squatted on the ground, in the mean- 
time without saying a word or moving a muscle: only the deep breathing 
betrayed they were alive. 
909. The son rose out of the silent circle and prepared to dig the 
grave within the house. Up to the present moment my ear had not heard 
the highest pitch of an Indian death-song by a very long way because 
hitherto the lamentation, as compared with what was to follow, was 
like what the zephyr is to the raging storm. The female and juvenile 
occupants of the village still remaining now gathered inside the building 
and each new-comer exerted her utmost with the most vigorous support 
to reinforce the howling, for I can only thus describe the uproar. After 
the son had dug the trough like grave some three or four feet deep, the 
relatives of the family, accompanied by the wailing chorus of the women, 
commenced emptying the house and putting outside all and everything 
that happened to be there, were it household goods, hunting or fishing 
implements. As soon as the last article had passed the door, in came the 
Piai who, by howling and yelling the whole night before, had tried to 
mollify the Evil Spirit without, however, succeeding in rescuing the 
chosen sacrifice from its toils. With an earnest and solemn countenance, 
he took up his position at the head of the corpse, bent down towards her 
left ear, and after shouting .several words into it at short intervals, again 
withdrew. The relatives then loosened the hammock from off the beam, 
bore the body in it to the grave, which in the meantime had been lined 
with palm fronds, lowered it into the ground and then drew the hammock 
away from underneath. jThe expression of grief now indeed bordered 
closely upon the animalesque, and the sympathy I had hitherto felt com- 
menced to disappear: a real madly-slirieking fury seemed to have seized 
the whole crowd, so that under the circumstances I thought I 
had to fear the worst. The whole of the relatives next circled round the 
grave, and as each reached the spot from whence he had started, he made 
a spring over it; even the barely twelve-weeks-old orphan was taken up 
in arms and made to jump it. 
910. Up to this time the sorrowing widower had been squatting silent, 
apathetic and unnoticed, in the house, the whole ceremony seeming to 
have passed off without making any impression on him. He now suddenly 
aroused himself, seized a calabash which, tilled with red pigment, stood at 
his side, stepped up to the still open grave and after strewing its contents 
over the corpse smashed it above her in such a way that all the chips fell 
