The shrieks and piercing cries uttered by the women over their dead relatives, are said to be truly fearful, and agreeably to the ancient custom of idolatrous eastern nations mentioned in 1 Kings xviii. 28, and in Jer. xlviii. 37,[61] they tear and lacerate themselves most frightfully, occasionally cutting off portions of their beards, and, having singed them, throwing them upon the dead body. With respect to their tombs, these are of various sorts in different districts. In the gulph of Carpentaria, on the Northern coast, Flinders found several skeletons of natives, standing upright in the hollow trunks of trees; the skulls and bones, being smeared or painted partly red and partly white, made a very strange appearance. On the banks of the river Darling, in the interior of Eastern Australia, Major Mitchell fell in with a tribe, which had evidently suffered greatly from small-pox,[62] or some similar disease, and in the same neighbourhood he met with some remarkable mounds or tombs, supposed to cover the remains of that portion of the tribe which had been swept off by the same disease that had left its marks upon the survivors. On a small hill, overlooking the river, were three large tombs, of an oval shape, and about twelve feet across in the longest diameter. Each stood in the centre of an artificial hollow, the mound in the middle being about five feet high; and on each of them were piled numerous withered branches and limbs of trees, forming no unsuitable emblems of mortality. There were no trees on this hill, save one quite dead, which seemed to point with its hoary arms, like a spectre, to the tombs. A melancholy waste, where a level country and boundless woods extended beyond the reach of vision, was in perfect harmony with the dreary foreground of the scene. [61] See Deut. xiv. 1, where the very spot is mentioned,--"between the eyes,"--which is always torn and scratched by the Australian female mourners. [62] This disease made dreadful ravages among the natives about the same time as the colony in New South Wales was settled. "The recollection of this scourge will long survive in the traditionary songs of these simple people. The consternation which it excited is yet as fresh in their minds, as if it had been an occurrence of but yesterday, although the generation that witnessed its horrors has almost passed away. The moment one of them was seized with it, was the signal for abandoning him to his fate. Brothers deserted their brothers, husbands their wives, wives their husbands, children their parents, and parents their children; and in some of the caves of the coast, heaps of decayed bones still indicate the spots where these ignorant and helpless children of nature were left to expire, not so much, probably, from the virulence of the disease itself, as from the want of sustenance."--WENTWORTH'S _Australia_, vol. i. p. 311. Third edition. See also COLLINS' _New South Wales_, p. 383.