Word: coffining
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...hide a trap door. (There actually was a trap door. When it was opened, the carpet sagged, despite the volunteers, and Houdini inched beneath the wall. This part of the act was hidden from both volunteers and audience by a screen.) He was soldered into a coffin made of galvanized iron and dunked in a swimming pool for an hour and a half. (Skeptics insisted that he had chemicals in the coffin to absorb carbon dioxide. But Houdini simply knew what turn-of-the-century doctors did not: the coffin contained all the air he needed...
Soon Bretons became convinced that this path was the way of penitence; tradition demanded that they follow it in pilgrimage at least once in their lifetime or else be obliged to do so after death, advancing only one coffin-length each year. In the 10th century, Benedictine monks built a monastery just outside the town, and the pilgrimage turned into a "pardon walk" around the monastery's land-hence the word Tromenie, which is Breton for "tour of the refuge...
...Last week the President's enemies went after what was supposed to be one of his strongest ouangas: the grave of his father, a tailor, who died last year. Grave robbers pried open the above-ground family tomb in Port-au-Prince's cemetery, hauled out the coffin, defiled the body. The outrage was kept secret from the bedridden President...
...travelers. The passengers seek to distract themselves, turning first to jitterbugging (led by a party girl named Daisi Doody), later to an atavistic sex cult called "Yurg," involving lascivious dances in a hall of mirrors. The chief engineer dies, and during a gaudy celebration is fired in a coffin to become a sun satellite. After 24 years of space travel, the remaining passengers die, aware too late that in the destruction of his home planet man had lost the only paradise he will ever know. A late survivor sings mankind's epitaph...
...family-Mrs. Dulles, two grown sons, a married daughter-sat the President of the U.S., his face set in sadness, and next to him his wife. As the Army band played Hark, Hark, My Soul, servicemen from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard lifted the coffin from the caisson and carried it to the grave. The Rev. Roswell P. Barnes, U.S. secretary of the World Council of Churches, read the burial service: "I am the resurrection and the life . . . Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust ..." Nineteen times, saluting cannon fire boomed and echoed...