Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 3.djvu/440

KONDH feathers, or, prettier still, with wreaths of wild flowers, to repair to the late chief's house, and, presenting themselves at the door, condole, with much vigour of lungs, with the now less disconsolate widows on their recent loss. This ceremony over, they tendered their allegiance to the young son of the dead Pātro, permitted by Government to take his place, and each man received from him an earthen cooking-pot, and each circle of villages a buffalo. The Khond is a beef eater, but a curious custom prevails in some parts, that a married woman must abstain from the flesh of a cow. These preliminary ceremonies over, the crowd adjourned, with great noise of shouting, blowing of buffalo horns, and beating of drums, to the open grassy spot marked by posts, where the late Pātro had been burned, and where a recently killed buffalo, weltering in its gore, now lay. Among the throng of men, women and children, most of the former more than slightly elevated by drinking copious draughts of a kind of beer made from the kuhari grain, were three Khonds carrying long poles surmounted by huge bunches of peacock feathers that blazed in the sunlight like emeralds and sapphires. The funeral dance now commenced. The dance itself is simple in the extreme, for, when the right spot was reached, old men and young began gyrating round and round in a large circle, a perfect human merry-go-round. The old grey-beards, plodding slowly round the ring, and stamping on the soil with their aged feet, presented a great contrast to the younger and wilder men, who capered and pranced about, sometimes outside the circle, waving their tanghis in the air, and every now and then leaping up to the slain buffalo, and dipping their axes into its blood, and then back again, dancing more wildly than ever, round and round from west to east, till the