FASCICULI MALATENSES 
77 
and as they differ considerably even in the same community, it will be well to 
deal with the two peoples separately. 
Among the Malays, interment is the universal rule at present; but it is 
said that until recently people who had died a ( bad * or unlucky death were 
frequently cast out to be eaten by dogs and vultures. Persons whose deaths 
are considered normal lie In state before burial, their relations and acquaint¬ 
ances visiting the body, the face of which is exposed, and taking farewell of 
their departed friend. Whether this is done in the case of women I do not 
know. The jaw is bound up, and until burial a piece of iron, generally a knife 
or kris , is laid upon the breast of the corpse, * to frighten Satan/ It is apparently 
removed at the funeral, before which the body must be washed seven times. 
The corpse, wrapped in a white shroud, is carried to the grave on a stretcher, 
covered with a bottomless coffin-shaped bier of bamboo or light wood, which 
is buried with it, as the Malays consider it a great crime to permit the earth 
to fall upon a dead person but think a coffin wrong, as likely to interfere 
with the resurrection of the body on the Day of Judgment, In Senggora, 
where the Matays are chiefly the descendants of prisoners of war brought 
from Kedah in the first half of the nineteenth century, and more rarely in the 
Pa tan i States, an elaborate tent-shaped frame of white cotton threads, stretched 
over twigs, is carried above the bier and deposited on the grave (Fig- 4). A 
stick is stuck into the ground to mark the position of the head and feet of the 
corpse. The grave itself is dug in the ordinary Mahommedan fashion, being 
a recess formed in one side of a fairly deep trench. In the case of men a 
rounded post of wood or stone (Fig. 2), carved more or less elaborately, is 
usually placed at the head and the foot of the grave, while women have a 
flattened slab, bulging out at the sides in the centre and constricted above and 
below (Fig. 3) ; but in some parts of the Patani States a mass of natural 
crystals is used in the case of either sex, while in Senggora upright tomb¬ 
stones (Fig. 1), rounded above and recalling the less elaborate specimens to 
be seen in any country churchyard in this country, sometimes mark the head 
of a man's grave. Very rich or pious persons occasionally have an oblong 
tent-shaped tomb built up with bricks and mortar, a few sticks being generally 
thrown across such graves, for what purpose I am ignorant. Probably both 
the sticks and the cotton framework have the same object, either to keep the 
dead man's ghost from walking or to prevent the entry of evil spirits from 
without, for neither would serve as the slightest protection against porcupines 
or other carrion-eaters. Possibly, however, they are mere scarecrows. 
In the case of Malays who have 1 died of being killed,' as the phrase is, 
that is to say, have died in any violent, sudden or unusual way (as by murder. 
