Word: pyre
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Five centuries ago, when Church was State and monkhood was in flower, Joan of Arc with shaven head prayed on a pile of faggots in Rouen, while Warwick's English soldiers set the pyre alight, and the crafty-eyed Bishop of Beauvais, "Unjust Judge Cauchon," twisted the amethyst ring on his finger and watched...
...outpost, "Blood of Christ, bring me chili, bring me peppers!" Armfuls and armfuls of dried chili were stacked on the windward side of the steeple by artful Insurrectos who took care to work under the eaves of the church, out of range of the machine gun. Then the pepper pyre was lighted. Thick clouds of oily, acrid, pepper smoke poured up to envelop the steeple, blind, gag, choke. Passed ten minutes. Then the bolts of the church door grated. Out to surrender filed a sorry, coughing, spitting, weepy little crew of federals. Their rebel captors, pious, had thus avoided...
...procession came at last to a funeral pyre, high, mighty and well laid. Round it the hundred widows grouped themselves for a final chorus of wails and lamentations. Slowly, reverently all that remained of Monarch Sisowath was borne to the top of the pyre and there set down. In life he had been an amiable if do-nothing puppet of France. His pleasures were slumber, meditation and degustation. Fittingly and honorably he was borne away to Buddha, amid the swelling and sizzling of mercury, and the sweet stench of aromatics...
...Hahahahaha. . . ." The dead included all but three of the armed train guards. Some 50 adults and children were murdered; but it was established that the Indians did not set fire to the train until all non-wounded passengers had climbed out. As the cars blazed in a great pyre, the wounded, slowly roasting to death, shrieked and groaned piteously...
...Greeks wove shrouds of asbestos fibre in which to cremate their dead. Thus the human ashes were kept from mixing with the wood ashes of the pyre. The Greeks also used asbestos cloth for handkerchiefs, and Charlemagne is said to have had an asbestos tablecloth which he threw into the fire to cleanse...