Word: pyre
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Forty-one passengers and a crew of three, on Pacific Air Lines Flight 773 bound from Reno to San Francisco, had died in a pyre of flaming gasoline on the morning of last May 7, when the plane plunged into a hill near San Ramon, Calif. Amid the wreckage, investigators found a .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum revolver containing six empty cartridges. Soon they learned that the weapon had been purchased in San Francisco the night before by Francisco Paula Gonzales, 27, a San Francisco warehouse man long besieged by marital and financial problems...
...This urn was filled with charred pieces identified as bone, while seven smaller urns contained all other ashes, those of Nehru's body as well as the wooden funeral pyre...
...sleepy fishing port of Phanthiet, 100 miles east of Saigon, a 21-year-old novice Buddhist monk named Nguyen Huong poured gasoline over his robes, then lit a match and turned himself into a human pyre. He was the second Buddhist priest to burn himself to death in protest against the authoritarian regime of South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem and his ruling family...
...burn. Joan of Arc's heart is said to have survived her burning at the stake and been thrown into the Seine. When Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned off Italy in 1822, three literary friends -Lord Byron, Edward John Trelawny and Leigh Hunt-cremated the corpse on a pyre of driftwood. The job almost done, Trelawny suddenly thrust in his arm and snatched out the heart, which, although fiery hot, was strangely unconsumed. In Oscar Wilde's fairy tale, The Happy Prince, the statue's broken heart fails to melt in the furnace...
...floor of the prison cell, the cockroach struggles frantically to escape its burning bed of straw. "Confess you're not a saint," shouts one convict hovering over the minuscule pyre, "or else the fire of heaven will consume your flesh amid hideous sufferings." Cries another: "Confess that the Prince of Evil has appeared to you and seduced you, but that you see the light and that repentance floods your heart." But the roach says nothing and goes up in flames. "She's damned. God forgive...