The sun slid down behind the mountain ridge lying close to the pueblo, and a dozen men armed with digging sticks and dirt baskets filed along the trail some fifteen rods to the last fringe of houses.  There they dug a grave in a small, unused sementera plat where only the old, rich men of the pueblo are buried.  A group of twenty-five old women gathered standing at the front of the house swaying to the right, to the left, as they slowly droned in melancholy cadence: 

You were old, and old people die.  You are dead, and now we shall place you in the earth.  We too are old, and soon we shall follow you.

Again and again they droned, and when they ceased others within the house took up the strain.  During the singing the carabao head was brought from the house, and the horns, with small section of attached skull, chopped out, and the head returned to the ceiling of the dwelling.

Presently a man came with a slender stick to measure the coffin.  He drove a nursing mother, with a woman companion and small child, from comfortable seats on the upturned wood.  The people, including the group of old women, were driven away from the front of the house, the coffin was laid down on the ground before the door, and an unopened 8-gallon olla of “preserved” meat was set at its foot.  An old woman, in no way distinguishable from the others by paraphernalia or other marks, muttering, squatted beside the olla.  Two men untied the bands from the corpse, and one lifted it free from the chair and carried it in his arms to the coffin.  It was most unsightly, and streams of rusty-brown liquid ran from it.  It was placed face up, head elevated even with the rim, and legs bent close at the knees but only slightly at the hips.  The old woman arose from beside the olla and helped lay two new breechcloths and a blanket over the body.  The face was left uncovered, except that a small patch of white cloth ravelings, called “fo-ot’,” was laid over the eyes, and a small white cloth was laid over the hair of the head.  The burden was quickly caught up on men’s shoulders and hurried without halting to the grave.  Willing bands swarmed about the coffin.  At all times as many men helped bear it as could well get hold, and when they mounted the face of a 7-foot sementera wall a dozen strong pairs of hands found service drawing up and supporting the burden.  Many men followed from the house one brought the coffin cover and another the carabao horns —­ but the women and children remained behind, as is their custom at burials.

At the grave the coffin rested on the earth a moment[22] while a few more basketfuls of dirt were thrown out, until the grave was about 5 feet deep.  The coffin was then placed in the grave, the cover laid on, and with a joke and a laugh the pair of horns was placed facing it at the head.  Instantly thirty-two men sprang on the piles of fresh, loose dirt, and with their hands and the half dozen digging sticks filled and covered the grave in the shortest possible time, probably not over one minute and a half.  And away they hurried, most of them at a dogtrot, to wash themselves in the river.