Lunacy meets with a peculiar treatment among the men of Tyari (their neighbours declare that all the tribe are mad together, and support that statement by various tales at their expense, which it is well not to repeat in their vicinity[139]). When all visits to a church of Name fail, the patient is absolutely buried alive. He is prepared for burial exactly as if he were a corpse, borne to the graveyard on a bier, and interred with the full church service. A small opening is left for him to breathe through; and at the end of twenty-four hours, he is carefully resurrected. The nervous shock has often beneficial results; but naturally not always. It must be owned, too, that the last case in which this treatment was tried to the knowledge of the writer produced a good deal of ill-feeling, because it was so doubtful whether the man was cured or not. He was buried quite properly; and his friends came at the right time to disinter him. But as soon as the stones were removed, he sprang up, exclaiming, "I am risen! I am risen! it is the Last Day!" Then, looking round disgustedly on the men who had come to assist him: "Whoever would have expected to see _you_ at the Resurrection of the Just?" Query: is that man still mad? His friends would like to think so. But they have an uneasy feeling that he "knows a hawk from a hernshaw when the wind is southerly." If the Tyari men are thus buried prematurely at times, there was an ancient custom among them (now extinct for generations), according to which they could dispense with burial altogether. Like many uncivilized peoples, in all climates, they had a habit of putting the aged out of the way of the young when they had no more joy in life; and in their own case got rid of them by throwing them down a special one of the numerous precipices in their country. The story goes that the habit came to be stopped through one particular man, who was carrying up his own father to dispose of him in the time-honoured way. As he scaled the mountain, he put down his burden to rest for a minute, at one particular tree; and as he did so, he heard the old man chuckle. "And what have you got to laugh at now?" said the son. "Ah well, I was just remembering"; said the old fellow. "It came to my mind how when I was carrying my old father up here, I put him down to rest myself just at this same tree; and it seemed to me rather comic. Your son, little Yaqub, will do just the same with you when your time comes, no doubt." That set the son, who had hitherto been acting just as custom decreed, thinking about things in a new way. He had to admit that he did not like the idea of his little son carrying him up in this fashion to throw him down a precipice; and perhaps it might be that his own old father did not quite like it either! So the end of his cogitations was that he carried the old man down again, and faced the horror of refusing to do as his fathers had done. Thus the custom fell into disuse.