eir
business, not minding us. We crouched up close together on the only
scrap of empty space, and watched.

Everything was less intense; the dead was only a poor and very old widow
who had lived her life out, and was not wanted. There were no near
kindred, only relations by marriage; it was evident everyone went
through the form without emotion of any sort.

The woman lay on a rough bier on the floor, and round her crowded a
dozen old women. At her head there was a brass vessel of water, a
lamp-stand, some uncooked rice, and some broken cocoanuts. Just before
we came in they had filled a little brass vessel from the larger one.
Now one of the old hags walked round the dead three times, pouring the
water out as she walked. Then another fed her--fed that poor dead mouth,
stuffed it in so roughly it made us sick and faint. There were other
things done hurriedly, carelessly; we could not follow them. The last
was the rubbing on of ashes--she had been a worshipper of Siva--also
they covered the closed eyes with ashes and patted them down flat. And
all the time the gabble of the women mocked at the silence of death.
There was no reverence, no sense of solemnity; the ceremonial so full
of symbol to its makers, the thinkers of Vedic times, was to them simply
a custom, a set of customs, to be followed and got through as quickly as
might be by heedless hands. And yet they faithfully carried out every
detail they knew, and they finished their heartless work and called to
the men to come. The men were waiting outside. They came in and carried
her out.

It seemed impossible to think of a photograph then; it was most unlikely
they would let us take one, and we hardly felt in the spirit of
picture-catching. Yet we thought of you, and of how you certainly could
never see it unless we could show it to you; and we wanted to show it to
you, so we asked them if we might. Of course if there had been real
grief, as in the other I had seen, we could not have asked it, it would
have been intrusion; but here there was none--_that_ was the pathos of
it. And they were very friendly, so they put their burden on the ground,
and waited.

There it is. To the right the barber stands with his fire-bowl hanging
from a chain; this is to light the funeral pyre. The smoke interfered
with the photo, but then it is true to life. To the left stands the man
with the shell ready to blow. At the back, with the sacred ashes rubbed
on forehead and breast and