s will go--
Tamala! tamala!

"For ever and ever horizons are lifting--
Tamala, tamala, sing as we row;
And life toward the stars of the ocean is drifting,
Through death will the morrow all endlessly glow--
Tamala, tamala,
Ever and ever;
The morrows will come and the morrows will go,
Tamala! tamala!"

The paddle dipped in the wave at the word _tamala_, and lifted high to
mark the measure of the song, and strew in the warm, soft air the watery
jewels colored by the far fires of the Sound. So the boat swept on, like a
spirit bark, and the beautiful word of immortality was echoed from the
darkening bluffs and the primitive pine cathedrals.

The place where the grave had been made was on the borders of the Oregon
desert, a wild, open region, walled with tremendous forests, and spreading
out in the red sunset like a sea. It had a scanty vegetation, but a slight
rain would sometimes change it into a billowy plain of flowers.

The tribe had begun to assemble about the grave early in the long
afternoon. They came one by one, solitary and silent, wrapped in blankets
and ornamented with gray plumes. The warriors came in the same solitary
way and met in silence, and stood in a long row like an army of shadows.
Squaws came, leading children by the hand, and seated themselves on the
soft earth in the same stoical silence that had marked the bearing of the
braves.

A circle of lofty firs, some three hundred feet high, threw a slanting
shadow over the open grave, the tops gleaming with sunset fire.

Afar, Mount Hood, the dead volcano, lifted its roof of glaciers twelve
thousand feet high. Silver ice and black carbon it was now, although in
the long ages gone it had had a history written in flame and smoke and
thunder. Tradition says that it sometimes, even now, rumbles and flashes
forth in the darkness of night, then sinks into rest again, under its
lonely ice palaces so splendid in the sunset, so weird under the moon.

Just as the red disk of the sun sunk down behind this stupendous scenery,
a low, guttural sound was uttered by Potlatch Hero, an old Indian brave,
and it passed along the line of the shadowy braves. No one moved, but all
eyes were turned toward the lodge of the old Umatilla chief.

He was coming--slowly, with measured step; naked, except the decent
covering of a blanket and a heroic ornament of eagle-plumes, and all
alone.