A not less strange and even more barbarous festival is that which is held about the same time as the one just mentioned. This consists in exhuming the bones of all those who have died during the year elapsed since the last N.E. monsoon, and have been interred in a sort of cemetery called "_Cuyucupa_."[11] They next bring these bones into a hut, seat themselves in a circle around the ghastly mementos, and shriek and howl as at the day on which the relation died. While this scene of lamentation is going on, a lighted cigar is usually stuck into the bony mouth of the grisly skull, after which the latter is consigned to the grave again. The rest of the bones however are either thrown into the deep sea or hid far in the forest, while at the same moment, as a farther evidence of sorrow, a number of cocoa-palms are cut down, and their fruit scattered to the winds. By such symbols they apparently wish to express their overwhelming grief, their weariness of existence, and their indifference to the most valued gifts of nature, so that they would even deprive themselves of the most universally necessary of the means of subsistence--were it not that, owing to the readiness with which the sea-shore palm is propagated, the nuts thus scattered at random, in all the indifference to sublunary considerations incidental to a paroxysm of grief, speedily strike root, and after a few years lift up their heads again in the forest, at once ornamental and nutritious. At all these festivals the natives assemble in the various villages, and at these seasons spend days and weeks with each other. Earlier visitors to Kar-Nicobar estimate the number of villages on the island at about six or seven only. The natives on the other hand gave us the names of the following thirteen: Arrong (or Arrow), Sáoui, Moose, Lapáte, Kinmai, Tapóimai, Chukchuitche, Kiukiuka, Tamalu, Páka, Malacca, Komios, and Kankéna, which all together would hardly number much above 100 huts, and about 800 or 900 inhabitants.