at the prayer that as long as fourteen Indras reign,
or as many years as there are hairs on her head, she may abide in
heaven with her husband; that during this time the heavenly dancers
may wait on her and her husband; and that by this act of merit all
the ancestors of her mother and husband may ascend to heaven. She
now presents her ornaments to her friends, ties some red cotton on
both wrists, puts two new combs in her hair, paints her forehead,
and takes into the end of the cloth that she wears some parched
rice and cowries. The dead body is bathed, anointed with butter,
and dressed in new clothes. The son takes a handful of boiled rice
and offers it in the name of his deceased father. Ropes and another
piece of cloth are spread on the wood, and the dead body is laid
upon the pile. The widow next walks round the pyre seven times,
as she did round the marriage-post at her wedding, strewing parched
rice and cowries as she goes, which the spectators catch and keep
under the belief that they will cure diseases. The widow then lies
down on the fatal pile by the side of the dead body. The bodies are
bound together with ropes and the faggots placed over them. The son,
averting his head, puts fire to the face of his father, and at the
same moment several persons light the pile at different sides, when
the women and mourners set up cries. More faggots are hastily brought
and thrown over the pile, and two bamboo levers are pressed over them
to hold down the bodies and the pile. Several persons are employed in
holding down these levers. More clarified butter, pitch and faggots
are thrown on to the pile till the bodies are consumed. This may
take about two hours, but I conceive the woman must be dead in a few
minutes after the fire has been kindled."

As showing the tenacity with which women sometimes adhered to their
resolve to be burned with their husbands, and thus, as they believed,
resume their conjugal life in heaven, the following account by Sir
William Sleeman, in his _Rambles and Recollections_, of a _sati_
at Jubbulpore may be given:

"At Gopalpur on the Nerbudda are some very pretty temples built
for the most part to the memory of women who have burned themselves
with the remains of their husbands, and on the very spot where the
cremation occurred. Among them was one recently raised over the ashes
of one of the most extraordinary old bodies I had ever seen, who
burned herself in my presence in 1829. In March 1828 I