190 
MADAGASCAR. 
eats with; and she is not allowed to wash her face or 
her hands, hut only the tips of her fingers. She en¬ 
dures all this sometimes for a year, or at least for eight 
months; and, even when that is over, her time of 
mourning is not ended for a considerable time after¬ 
wards ; and she is not allowed to go home to her own 
relatives until she has been divorced first, like all wives 
who are divorced, for the relatives of her husband 
divorce her. 
“ The children of the deceased fetch wood from the 
forest, choosing a durable kind, with a tall straight 
trunk, with two branching forks like the horns of an 
ox, and this they erect on an open piece of ground or 
by the roadside, as a remembrance of the dead, just as 
an upright stone ( tsangam-bato ) is erected in Imerina. 
This tall post thus set up they call firo. [In Hova 
j’iro means a lamp.] 
“And the house in which the deceased died they 
leave, and no one occupies it again; they do not pull it 
down, but let it fall to pieces of itself; but they do not 
go away from the village [as do the Sakalava]. They 
called such houses "broken houses' (trdno fdlaka) ; but 
the custom is now falling into disuse.” 
