ons heard, as if from afar off, what was said,
and nevertheless would have let himself be burned, and his flesh cut,
without opposing it or feeling it.

Corneille le Bruyn,[571] in his Voyages, relates that he saw at
Damietta, in Egypt, a Turk whom they called the Dead Child, because
when his mother was with child with him, she fell ill, and as they
believed she was dead, they buried her pretty quickly, according to
the custom of the country, where they let the dead remain but a very
short time unburied, above all during the plague. She was put into a
vault which this Turk had for the sepulture of his family.

Towards evening, some hours after the interment of this woman, it
entered the mind of the Turk her husband, that the child she bore
might still be alive; he then had the vault opened, and found that his
wife had delivered herself, and that his child was alive, but the
mother was dead. Some people said that the child had been heard to
cry, and that it was on receiving intimation of this that the father
had the tomb opened. This man, surnamed the Dead Child, was still
living in 1677. Le Bruyn thinks that the woman was dead when her child
was born; but being dead, it would not have been possible for her to
bring him into the world. It must be remembered, that in Egypt, where
this happened, the women have an extraordinary facility of delivery,
as both ancients and moderns bear witness, and that this woman was
simply shut up in a vault, without being covered with earth.

A woman at Strasburg, who was with child, being reputed to be dead,
was buried in a subterranean vault;[572] at the end of some time, this
vault having been opened for another body to be placed in it, the
woman was found out of the coffin lying on the ground, and having
between her hands a child, of which she had delivered herself, and
whose arm she held in her mouth, as if she would fain eat it.

Another woman, a Spaniard,[573] the wife of Francisco Aravallos, of
Suasso, being dead, or believed to be so, in the last months of her
pregnancy, was put in the ground; her husband, whom they had sent for
from the country, whither he had gone on business, would see his wife
at the church, and had her exhumed: hardly had they opened the coffin,
when they heard the cry of a child, who was making efforts to leave
the bosom of its mother.

He was taken away alive and lived a long time, being known by the name
of the Child of the Earth; and since then he was