Word: pyre
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...suicide of his scheming henchman Goebbels, the defection of those who fattened on the blood he had spilled, the last-minute marriage with his blowzy mistress Eva Braun, the suicide pact they made together, and the final dispatch of their bodies to Valhalla in the flames of a funeral pyre wrote a tawdry Wagnerian finish to the evil story...
...consecrated ground, a strange funeral ceremony took place. Beside the heaped-up wood of a funeral pyre, a Christian read prayers. Then a Hindu lit the dry wood, and the flames leapt up around the body of Denis Doyle, who had died confident that he-and all men -would be happier without a body...
Siva, the many-ratured and versatile god of destruction, is doing a land-office business in Jodhpur these days. Ever since the Hindu widow Sugan Kunwar Singh flung herself sacrificially-and illegally-into the flames of her husband's funeral pyre last October (TIME, Nov. 1), Jodhpur has been on a religious binge. Self-styled holy men from miles around have swarmed into town to cash in on the popular fervor. Hawkers in the city's crowded bazaar are peddling ballads and poems extolling the virtues of suttee, the accepted name for the widow's sacrifice...
Jodhpur's cops, under the agitated command of Police Superintendent Sobhagmal Surana, have been on constant guard at the city's cremation grounds to prevent further acts of suttee. The priest who had charge of the original Singh funeral is in jail awaiting trial for making a pyre built for two. But every day and night, crowds of worshipers throng the death site with offerings that range from coconuts to gold plate, and from all sides the halt, the near hopeless and the blind hobble into the city, seeking miracles and willing to pay the holy men generously...
...argument ensued, and some of Waly's followers grabbed the lighted torches. One of them stumbled. A tree flared up with a whoosh. In panic, others threw their torches away. In a moment the yard became an oil-soaked pyre. The impregnated sawdust blazed like napalm, clinging to raw flesh, burning and spreading. The crowd, roaring with fear and pain, ran from side to side in the narrow schoolyard. But there was no escape: three of the walls were 10 feet high; the only exit was a narrow gate. It was over in 20 minutes: 33 died, hundreds more...