On Friday, August 16, 1861, Queen Rànavàlona died at the age of eighty-one, after a reign of thirty-three years; or--as the Malagasy rather poetically put it--‘she turned her back on the affairs of this life,’ since they dared not say that a sovereign died. She ended her long life of cruelty and shameless immorality in the darkness of heathenism, without a ray of hope for the future to lighten up the gloom of the dark valley, while terrors of some kind--probably the superstitious horrors of a guilty conscience--seem to have tormented her during her last hours; as if the shadows from the swift-coming eternity were appalling her, chilling her heart, and filling her soul with horrors. Her reign was a veritable reign of terror, and lives as such in the memory of her people. They tell that when any of her fighting bulls died she had their carcases rolled in silk plaids and buried; but when her subjects complained of the severity of the forced labour which she demanded, she used to say: ‘Make three of them!’ that is, behead them and cut them through the middle! It is believed that during her reign some ten thousand perished from the poison ordeal alone. Her Christian subjects were treated as common criminals, and chained together by the neck by hundreds, a gang of them sometimes extending to nearly half a mile. If one of the gang died, the dead body had to be dragged along by the living, until the guard struck off the head and released them from the ‘body of death.’ In the interior of the island, in the Bètsilèo country and wherever the Hovas had jurisdiction, criminals were kept in chains. Some of the condemned Christians were so treated. Prisoners had to earn their own living, and were only confined to prison during the night. On the days, however, on which the sovereign appeared they were not allowed to leave the prison; or if allowed out on those days, at noon, before the sovereign was to appear, they had all to return to prison, were counted and locked up. Why? Because if one of those criminals managed to secrete himself, and then emerged from his hiding-place to gaze at and salute the sovereign as she passed, wearing her diadem and beautiful in the glory of her royal apparel, he was a free man whatever his crime had been. His chains were at once struck off, for he had looked on the sovereign in her beauty and saluted her--the salutation being: ‘Is it well with you, my sovereign?’ and no one could do that and still remain a prisoner. ‘Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty’ (Isa. xxxiii. 17); ‘Whosoever shall call on the name of Jehovah shall be delivered’ (Joel ii. 32).