Word: pyre
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Upon the Plaza de la Constitución towered a great funeral pyre. From a platform before it the Bishop celebrated mass. Then a match crackled, the pyre towered into flame. For an hour, untiring, zealous, the Bishop cast upon it books adjudged heretical. The first victim was a treatise by erudite philosopher Unamuno, the last a novel by author-poet Blasco Ibañez. Erring news gatherers chronicled this event as an "auto-da-fé"-an extinct form of inquisitional ceremony† of which the last orthodox examples occurred in the reign of Charles...
...Truly a widow is as a withered faggot. Let her then burn on her lord's funeral pyre...
...waters of the Rhine closed over the fateful Ring; swaggering Siegfried, murdered, burned on a giant pyre, Brünnhilde with him; Walhalla flamed red in the sky and, greed punished, the curtain at the Metropolitan Opera House, Manhattan, fell last week on the first performance of the season of Richard Wagner's Gotterdammerung, stupendous finale of the Nibelungen Ring, fifth of the Wagner matinees. Nanny Larsen-Todsen, recovering from an illness, sang the difficlut music of Brünnhilde, creditably. Michael Bohmen, big bass also billed as "indisposed," was sinister, impressive, magnificent; Friedrich Schorr, superb as Gunther; Rudolph...
...disastrously, roamed Europe, met Shelley and Byron, recovered and cremated the former's body off Leghorn (it was he who snatched Shelley's heart from the pyre and buried it in Rome), fought beside Byron in Greece (it was he who investigated the dead Byron's feet and spread the lie about a cloven hoof), married a Greek chieftain's sister, suffered terrible wounds, corresponded devotedly with Mary Shelley. He later wrote Recollections of the Last Days of Byron and Shelley, an invaluable document. He visited the U. S., swimming Niagara between the rapids...
...natural that this great and good friend of Britain should have a pucka (proper) Brahmin funeral. But attempts by the British Ambassador, Lord Crewe, to have his corpse burned on a funeral pyre in the open air met with numerous difficulties, and it was ultimately decided to have his remains cremated. His body, dressed in royal robes, wearing the royal jewels, was reduced to cinders in the furnace of a crematorium...