"When a man dies at home, his body is placed on a rude table, and his friends meet for days round the corpse, drinking, eating, shouting, and singing, until the body begins actually to fall to pieces. Then the body is tied in a fagot of poles and carried on men's shoulders up and down some open space, followed by doctors and drummers. The doctors demand of the dead man the cause of his death, whether by poison or witchcraft; and if by the latter, who was the witch? Most of the deaths I have known of in Negro-land were from pulmonary diseases, but all were set down to witchcraft. The jerking of the bier to and fro, causing the men bearing it to stumble hither and thither, is taken as the dead man's answer; thus, as in the case of spirit-rapping at home, the reply is spelled out. The result of this enquiry is implicitly believed in; and, if the case demands it, the witch is drowned." Among the Barotse of South Africa[78] "funerals take place at night, and generally immediately after death, while the body is still warm. If the person, when alive, possessed the skin of an animal, they wrap the body in it, and also in a plain mat, and then bury it near the hut. But death inspires them with a mortal terror, and thus the hut of the dead man is nearly always abandoned. Anything that has been used for the burial, such as the wood on which the corpse was carried, is left near the grave. It is the fashion to display great external signs of grief, howls and cries of lamentation and the like. Formerly the graves of chiefs were distinguished by elephant tusks turned toward the east. All cattle belonging to the deceased are killed; and any animal of which he was particularly fond, such as the cow whose milk he drank, is killed first. They bury in the kraal itself those who died in the kraal; but whenever it is possible, the dying are taken out and laid in the fields or forest. There are two reasons for this: first, they think that away from other people is a better chance of the invalid making a recovery; and, secondly, wherever the person dies he must be buried; therefore, if possible, far from their habitations. When a man dies, visits of condolence are paid to the relatives, the visitors bringing a calf or a head of cattle as a mark of sympathy, which is killed and eaten as a kind of consolation. The night after the funeral is passed in tears and cries. A few days later, the doctor comes and makes an incision on the forehead of each of the survivors, and fills it with medicine, in order to ward off contagion and the effect of the sorcery which caused the death. They place on their tombs some souvenir of the profession or vocation of the defunct; for example,--if he had been a hunter, horns or skins; if a chairmaker, a chair; and so on. Over the grave a sacred tree is planted. The tree is a kind of laurel called 'morata.'... A man will kill himself on the tomb of his chief; he thinks, as he passes near by, that he hears the dead man