Page:A pilgrimage to my motherland.djvu/80

Rh Drums were beating, the women singing, and as many as had sufficient command of their legs were dancing. They permitted me to see the corpse, and to my astonishment I found it wrapped with cloths, in exactly the same manner as are Egyptian mummies. The cloth is usually the best the friends of the deceased can purchase. On this occasion they used one which I had presented the chief a few days before. It was laid in an open piazza, the walls around which were draped with velvet and other costly cloths. All this time there was moving through the city a procession, made up of drummers, men bearing a board covered with cloths to represent the corpse, women singing alternately songs of lamentation and of praises to the dead, with other men firing guns, and all dancing and otherwise enacting the most extravagant gestures. The deceased is always buried in the house in which he lived. Sometimes a stone is placed on the spot, on which offerings to his manes are occasionally deposited. In some cases, where the party was greatly respected, on account of his position on earth, he becomes after death the subject of religious adoration.

The Africans are not behind either the English or Americans in their love of pageantry. The writer does not remember a day spent at Abbeokuta without having witnessed something of this sort. The most