They do not burn fakeers—­those revered mendicants.  They are so holy that they can get to their place without that sacrament, provided they be consigned to the consecrating river.  We saw one carried to mid-stream and thrown overboard.  He was sandwiched between two great slabs of stone.

We lay off the cremation-ghat half an hour and saw nine corpses burned.  I should not wish to see any more of it, unless I might select the parties.  The mourners follow the bier through the town and down to the ghat; then the bier-bearers deliver the body to some low-caste natives —­Doms—­and the mourners turn about and go back home.  I heard no crying and saw no tears, there was no ceremony of parting.  Apparently, these expressions of grief and affection are reserved for the privacy of the home.  The dead women came draped in red, the men in white.  They are laid in the water at the river’s edge while the pyre is being prepared.

The first subject was a man.  When the Doms unswathed him to wash him, he proved to be a sturdily built, well-nourished and handsome old gentleman, with not a sign about him to suggest that he had ever been ill.  Dry wood was brought and built up into a loose pile; the corpse was laid upon it and covered over with fuel.  Then a naked holy man who was sitting on high ground a little distance away began to talk and shout with great energy, and he kept up this noise right along.  It may have been the funeral sermon, and probably was.  I forgot to say that one of the mourners remained behind when the others went away.  This was the dead man’s son, a boy of ten or twelve, brown and handsome, grave and self-possessed, and clothed in flowing white.  He was there to burn his father.  He was given a torch, and while he slowly walked seven times around the pyre the naked black man on the high ground poured out his sermon more clamorously than ever.  The seventh circuit completed, the boy applied the torch at his father’s head, then at his feet; the flames sprang briskly up with a sharp crackling noise, and the lad went away.  Hindoos do not want daughters, because their weddings make such a ruinous expense; but they want sons, so that at death they may have honorable exit from the world; and there is no honor equal to the honor of having one’s pyre lighted by one’s son.  The father who dies sonless is in a grievous situation indeed, and is pitied.  Life being uncertain, the Hindoo marries while he is still a boy, in the hope that he will have a son ready when the day of his need shall come.  But if he have no son, he will adopt one.  This answers every purpose.

Meantime the corpse is burning, also several others.  It is a dismal business.  The stokers did not sit down in idleness, but moved briskly about, punching up the fires with long poles, and now and then adding fuel.  Sometimes they hoisted the half of a skeleton into the air, then slammed it down and beat it with the pole, breaking it up so that it would burn better.  They hoisted skulls up in the same way and banged and battered them.  The sight was hard to bear; it would have been harder if the mourners had stayed to witness it.  I had but a moderate desire to see a cremation, so it was soon satisfied.  For sanitary reasons it would be well if cremation were universal; but this form is revolting, and not to be recommended.