A little before reaching the summit of one ridge we heard a good deal of noise and shouting ahead of us, and supposed that the Tanàla were dragging an unusually large piece of timber. On getting nearer, we found fifty or sixty people, men and women, and a number of men carrying something, which, coming closer to them, we found was a child’s coffin, made of a piece of the trunk of a tree hollowed out, and with a rough cover of wood fastened on with bands of a strong creeper. This was being carried with a barbarous kind of chant, but without the slightest sign of mourning on the part of anyone. It was the most heathenish kind of funeral we had ever seen. Among these forest people funerals are called _fàndrorìtam-pàty_ (_lit._ “stretching out of the corpse”), and it seems that the coffin is pulled about first in one direction and then in another by the different parties of those following it; and it is finally thrown into some hollow in the woods. It was a saddening sight. We found that we had come again among our old friends, the Tanàla, for in their mats and undressed appearance, and their use of bark cloth, the women in the villages were just like those we had seen from Ivòhitròsa downwards. Our second day in the forest brought us to a height of fourteen hundred and fifty feet above the sea; and, notwithstanding our fatigue from having to walk continually for several hours, we were charmed again with the luxuriance of the vegetation. The anìvona-palms shot up their slender columns, banded with lines of white on dark green to heights of eighty to a hundred feet, and the traveller’s trees were as lofty, in the fierce competition for life. The tree-ferns spread out their graceful fronds over the streams; and the _Vaquois pandanus_ carried its large clusters of serrated leaves high overhead to get up to the light. In some places the woods were very dense, and there was a green twilight as we passed along the narrow path amongst the crowd of tall trunks. We were struck by the intense silence of the forest; there was no sound of animal life, and no voice of bird, or beast, or insect broke the oppressive stillness. For six hours and a half we hardly saw a house except isolated woodcutters’ huts; and we were glad at last to see the sparkling waters of the Mànanjàra in front of us, and to find a village of twenty houses on its banks. [Sidenote: THE CICADA]