Sometimes the rain-charm operates through the dead. Thus in New Caledonia the rain-makers blackened themselves all over, dug up a dead body, took the bones to a cave, jointed them, and hung the skeleton over some taro leaves. Water was poured over the skeleton to run down on the leaves. They believed that the soul of the deceased took up the water, converted it into rain, and showered it down again.​[964] In some parts of New Caledonia the {p285} ceremony is somewhat different. A great quantity of provisions is offered to the ancestors, being laid down before their skulls in the sacred place. In front of the skulls a number of pots full of water are set in a row, and in each pot there is deposited a sacred stone which has more or less the shape of a skull. The rain-maker then prays to the ancestors to send rain. After that he climbs a tree with a branch in his hand, which he waves about to hasten the approach of the rain-clouds.​[965] The ceremony is a mixture of magic and religion; the prayers and offerings to the ancestors are purely religious, while the placing of the skull-like stones in water and the waving of the branch are magical. In Russia, if common report may be believed, it is not long since the peasants of any district that chanced to be afflicted with drought used to dig up the corpse of some one who had drunk himself to death and sink it in the nearest swamp or lake, fully persuaded that this would ensure the fall of the needed rain. In 1868 the prospect of a bad harvest, caused by a prolonged drought, induced the inhabitants of a village in the Tarashchansk district to dig up the body of a Raskolnik, or Dissenter, who had died in the preceding December. Some of the party beat the corpse, or what was left of it, about the head, exclaiming, “Give us rain!” while others poured water on it through a sieve.​[966] Here the pouring of water through a sieve seems plainly an imitation of a shower, and reminds us of the manner in which Strepsiades in Aristophanes imagined that rain was made by Zeus.​[967] An Armenian rain-charm is to dig up a skull and throw it into running water.​[968] At Ourfa for this purpose they prefer the skull of a Jew, which they cast into the Pool of Abraham.​[969] In Mysore people think that if a leper is buried, instead of being burnt, as he ought to be, rain will not fall. Hence they have been known to disinter buried lepers in time of drought.​[970] In Halmahera there is a practice of {p286} throwing stones on a grave, in order that the ghost may fall into a passion and avenge the disturbance, as he imagines, by sending heavy rain.​[971] This may explain a rain-charm which seems to have been practised by the Mauretanians in antiquity. A mound in the shape of a man lying on his back was pointed out as the grave of the giant Antaeus; and if any earth were dug up and removed from it, rain fell till the soil was replaced.​[972] Perhaps the rain was the revenge the surly giant