The first thing I saw gave me something of a shock. It was an object wrapped in a reed mat, and slung from a pole, supported between two trees, the cords supporting it passed under the shoulders and knees, so that the latter were slightly flexed by the weight of the body, and allowed one just to perceive a human shape through the rigid outline of the _bango_ mat. Looking round, I saw a number of graves—some fairly recent—but no other interment like the above. The mounds were not like ours, but nearly as broad as long, and looked more like rough garden-beds than anything else. On them were laid broken sifting-baskets, handles of hoes (or axes), and pots, these last with a hole in the bottom of each. Pots of all sorts and sizes were scattered all over the grove, some of them seemingly very old. There was nothing else to mark the older graves, which were now level with the surrounding soil. I noticed two or three shallow pits near the mounds; these were not half-completed graves (for the digging is not begun till the corpse is actually on the spot), but traps to catch the wizards, in case they should arrive with the views indicated in a former chapter. There are two possible explanations of what I saw, neither of which I succeeded in obtaining at the time. One is that people dying of smallpox (and perhaps other infectious diseases) are not buried in the earth, but the corpse is ‘hung up to let the disease fly away with the wind, instead of keeping it about the place.’ The intention is thus excellent from a sanitary point of view, if the result is unfortunately rather wide of the mark. As it happened that the disease had just about that time been brought down from the Lake by some Atonga, and several people in the Blantyre neighbourhood had died of it, this was probably the reason in the above case. (_See note at end of chapter._) Some clans of the Atonga appear to have been in the habit of burying their dead in trees, placing the corpses in their mats on convenient forked branches; and, as there were a good many Atonga temporarily in the district, it is just possible that the man so buried may have belonged to one of the clans in question; though the grove was commonly known as ‘the Chipeta burying-ground,’ and used, I believe, by members of that tribe only—or at least by dwellers in the villages called by their name. The Anyanja and Yaos bury with the legs bent; the Atonga, apparently, lay the body stretched at full length. As soon as any one is known to be dead, the wail is raised by the women about the hut. Sometimes (among the Atonga) some of the nearest friends, when the end is seen to be at hand, come out of the hut and cry silently till told that all is over.