Morning journal and courier., 1885-05-22
The Correct Way to Die in Persia.


 The sick man lies in extremis on thin mattress upon the floor, covered by a quilted silken coverlet. Twenty or thirty persons are in the room where he is dying. The smoke of many hubble-bubbles clouds the air; whispered conversation is general The doctors have declared their patients condi- tion hopeless, anu, as a last resort, certain charms suggested by weird looking dervish
 have been tried. But the crab broth, pre-
 pared from the tiny crustaceans that inbabit
 the streamlets round Shiraz, the patient has
 been unable to swallow; and the dervish
 points out to the relatives of the dying man
 that his panacea has only not proved infallible
 because it was tried too late. A yelled wo-
 man, the wife of the dying man, sits weep
 ing at the side of her husbands pillow. She
 frequently holds to his face a moistened
 piece of mud torn from the wall (this wetted
 mud is supposed to have very reviving in-
 fuence, and is used by Persians we use
 smelling salts.
 Tea is handed round in small cups; the crowd in the room becomes greater; every window is shut, and, as the outside tempera- ture is ninety degrees, some idea of the heat within can be formed. The crowd is not
 here from mere curiosity. A man is sick; then where should his friends be, they say, if not by his bedside? The samovars (Rus- sian tea urns) steam and bubble; the room is filled with clouds of tobacco smoke and the steam from the urns. And now, just as two hundred years ago was done in England, a fowl is killed and placed warm and bleeding on the patients feet. All is of no avail, however The man has breathed his last. l The wife yields her place by the bedside. Moistened cottonwood is placed in the mouth of the dead, in the orifces of the nostrils I1l~ 4- aloud the prescribed portion of the Koran, commencing 70 man, I swear by the instruc- | tive Koran that thou art one of the messen- gers of God sent to show the right way, " &c This portion of the Mussulmans sacred book was called by Mohammed himself "the | heart of the Koran" And now all present witness aloud that the dead man was good and pious Mohammedan. The limbs are composed and cup of water is placed at the head of the corpse. No sooner IS this done | than a moollah ascends to the flat roof of | the house and begins to read in shril mon otone certain verses from the holy book. | This announces to the neighbors that the man is vertically dead; and at the same mo- ment his relations shriek and vail, "Woe, woe! he is dead; he has passed away" These are the expressions of a real grief. But pres | ently the professional mourners arrive and rend the air with their shrill screaming, which is like the ''keening" of the Irish. The house is soon filled with friends and l neighbors, who add their cries to the screams of the mourners. The women of the family hasten to array themselves in "bltter" Q. G., sombre) garnents-not in actual black, but | in sad colors: neither they nor the men wash or dress their hair until the funeral and the first days of mourning are over. The male
 relatives do not literally rend their garments,
 but give them the right appearance by open | inp certain seams of their coats and cloaks
 with penknife; and instead of casting dust | upon their heads they dab mud on their hats. And now come the ''washers of the dead 'i | To each parish are attached family of these people, who get despised livelihood by per
 forming the last offices for the dead The
 corpse having been washed at an adjoining stream, the hands are placed across the chest
 and it is wrapped in the shroud of cotton
 cloth that the deceased has probably had by
 him, as sort of memento mori, for years Camphor (real vegetable camphor) is placed
 beneath the shroud, and the body is laid in :
 rough coffin made of thin blanks and brought
 back to the house. The coffin in Persia is od
 a thin and unsubstantial kind, and the bur | ial always takes place within twenty-fou1 | hours of deeease.