Native burial ceremony

( 063 ) February 20th, 1839.
On the last Thursday evening, the native Wariato*, one of the two wives of her husband Munaitya, died. She was one of the tallest and strongest women of all her compatriots in the prime of her life, and was about 25 to 30 years old. The cause of her illness and death was such as would not be expected among the natives, namely, a miscarriage. She spent most of the last day of her life without rational consciousness; For example, she called as loudly as she could to her mother, who was standing close to her. When her end was approaching after sunset and there was a general howl, I rushed over and found her not quite dead, but struggling with death and wheezing loudly. I fetched some wine, but the men would not allow me to give it to her, pretending that her teeth were already closed, as was the case. Since the breath lingered in her for quite a long time, perhaps because the men kept her in an upright position, I left before she passed away.

On Friday morning my first business was to look around for the dead Wariato, and was astonished to see her so wrapped up in an old piece of stuff that she was no longer half her natural length; I inquired later ( 064 ) wherefore she was so short, and heard that her arms were folded against her breast, and her legs were folded against her body. Many natives sat around the deceased, some with their heads resting on her body, and expressed their sympathy with loud howls and a stream of tears. Afterwards she was placed on a stretcher tied together with poles covered with dry grass and covered with green branches and carried by 8 to 10 men. At first they walked around the spot where she had died, now and then standing still for a moment and one of them put his mouth close to her head and lisped as if he wanted to say something in her ear. Sometimes, remaining in the same spot, they turned around several times, stopped again and one whispered; turned again in the opposite direction and repeated the same thing. All this led me to suspect that people were making attempts to find out something about the deceased; So I asked what those movements and especially the whispers mean. To this I received an answer, of which I understood at least enough that the natives believed that one of the Eastmen had killed the woman. These hikes continued on Saturday, in all the places where their camp had previously been.

The deceased was to be buried on Sunday morning and I promised to be with them at sunrise; But I overslept ( 065 ) and when I got there the assembly had already left. Since I didn't know the place of burial, I had no choice but to take one of the few who remained behind with me and hurry after him. His sleuthing ability was able to recognize the path that the assembly had taken from the track, and so we soon came to the place where the pile had been stored and where the body was to be buried. A man makes the grave using a club and a kind of wooden scale, with the former he loosens the hard earth and with the latter he throws out what has been loosened. The shape of the grave was elongated and round, wider at the bottom and a little narrower at the top. When I arrived, the tomb was already half