Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 7, 2025
Here and there he lay in such rubbish as motionless as the effigies careen on marble biers. With the growing light grew the heap of the slain on Auld Jock's grave. Having done his best, Bobby lay down again, worse in appearance than before, but with a stouter heart.
However, we were glad to get back into the sheep-skin bags and draw the fur rugs up to our noses, and though I had so many brilliant things to say under the tree I could not think of one of them on our way home. Fourteen big, ugly boars were brought and laid to rest in the large hall, on biers of pine branches, with a pine branch artistically in the mouth of each.
But they have grown familiar with a custom that, generation after generation, has been observed by their race till it has ceased to be repugnant. They call it "consigning the dead to the element of air." For this purpose they have roofless enclosures, the walls of which are twenty-five or thirty feet high, and within are three biers one each for men, women and children.
Farewell, friend." For some little time, although I had known that the daylight was growing and what was around me, I had scarce seen the things I had before noted so keenly; but now in a flash I saw all the east crimson with sunrise through the white window on my right hand; the richly-carved stalls and gilded screen work, the pictures on the walls, the loveliness of the faultless colour of the mosaic window lights, the altar and the red light over it looking strange in the daylight, and the biers with the hidden dead men upon them that lay before the high altar.
Drunken pastophori had flung open the rooms where the vestments and sacred vessels were kept, and from these treasuries the ribald mob had dragged forth panther-skins such as the priests wore when performing the sacred functions, brass cars for carrying sacrifices, wooden biers on which the images of the gods were borne in solemn processions, and other precious objects.
Some of the women had jumped on to the processional biers and were being carried round the hall by staggering youths, screaming with alarm and laughter; if one of them lost her balance and fell she was captured with shrieks of merriment and forced to mount her insecure eminence again.
Even at funerals the use of costly shawls on the biers of females was not permitted. The poor of Galata were considered the following day, and we repaired to the Synagogue, there to distribute Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore's gifts. In the course of the day Mr Pisani called, informing Sir Moses that he would receive a decoration from the Sultan.
But so many diverse sentiments have passed before him on biers; he has seen so many tears, true and false; he has beheld sorrow under so many aspects and on so many faces; he has heard such endless thousands of eternal woes, that to him sorrow has come to be nothing more than a stone an inch thick, four feet long, and twenty-four inches wide.
This foreboded evil, and a vision rose before me of two biers; on one lay Ann, pale and dumb, and on the other my Cousin Gotz's sweetheart, fair Gertrude, the copper-smith's daughter.
The chief of the eunuchs dragged him off with horrible grimaces, and repeated as he went: “Ay, I foresaw she would play you some ungracious turn!” No sooner was the Caliph gone than the Emir commanded biers to be brought, and forbad that any one should enter the harem.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking