The people stand and shake their heads.  The news wanders from lip to lip, “She is dying.”  All the pleasure, every interest in the performance, has vanished.  Indifferent to the celebration, the Queres hang their heads in sadness; yet no complaint is heard, not a tear glistens in those mournful eyes.  She is only dying, not dead.

But who is dying?  The query cannot be answered up here.  Let us go down and follow Mitsha.

In the dingy room of an Indian home, where light and air penetrate through a single diminutive air-hole, sit and crouch half a dozen people.  They surround at some distance a human being whose head rests on a bundle of skins, the body on a buffalo-robe.  The knees are drawn up, and cotton mantles cover the lower extremities.  The chest, scantily covered with a ragged, dark-coloured wrap, heaves at long intervals; the extremities begin to stretch; the face is devoid of expression; the eyes are wide open, staring, glassy; the lips parted; and on each side of the mouth-corners ominous wrinkles begin to form.  The sufferer is a woman, and as we look closer we recognize her as Say Koitza, the wife of Zashue.  He must hasten his steps if he wishes to find her upon earth, for she is dying!

It is very still in the room.  The prayers which the medicine-man of the Tanos has been reciting are hushed, the little idols of lava with red-painted faces and eyes made of turquoises by means of which he hoped to conjure the sickness, lean against the wall useless.  Those whose duty it is cower about the dying woman, and look on speechless.  How faint the breathings grow, how the chest rises and falls at longer intervals, weaker every time!  They listen as the rattling in her throat becomes harder and slower.  They dare not weep, for all is not over.

Say Koitza is dying!  Not the sudden death she once prayed for when Topanashka her father went over to Shipapu; but still she dies a painless death,—­she dies from exhaustion.

What is going on in her mind while the fetters which tied her soul to the body are being dissolved?  That body is henceforth powerless; it has no wants, no cravings.  The soul becomes free.  Can it already glance beyond?  Not yet, for as long as earthly matter clings to him man cannot perceive the other world.  Flashes of light gleam through the mist in which he is plunged, through both physical weakness and the efforts of the soul to become free.  The body struggles for preservation, the spirit for freedom from its henceforth useless shell.

Are mind and body merely one?  Does not death put an end to everything that we ever were and can be?  Does there remain after death anything beyond the memory of our former existence, preserved in the hearts of our fellow-beings?  Nobody has ever returned from beyond the grave to tell us how he felt, what he thought, while dying.  But a dying person always casts rays of light over his surroundings, and the surroundings of dying Say Koitza are not without their lesson for us.