WHAT HAPPENS DURING CREMATION

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Volume 81, Issue 20, 16 October 1937, Page 15

WHAT HAPPENS DURING CREMATION

Nothing But Memories Left

youB CASKET — your corpse is inside — is Trieeled without its haudles to the pf the erematorium ovpn. Its head i* lifted into the oven floor aua fieayy bglk xolled meticulously into pQsition. There is the whine of a motor for & few seconds after the white-tiled three-foot flrebriek dpor grinds down riowly in its slots, and then commences |he only music that this strange Gothie death ehapel knows — the roar of flame d©ep in the bowols of the towerCd pasonry. A sullen booming is heard, W?it©» Elliot Stocker in the American Mercury, as |h© op buruer in the ©ombu©tipn chamber below the oven takes hold pnd waima up. After a fhort pause there eovnds a louder, closer roa? as the heary spray of oil flame spurts into the ©ven and embraces the head of the fasket. Through the doors pf thi# crematory have passed more ladpn caskets than the siperintendent who manipulates the fompressed air and the oil valves and Watches the heat waves and the eolour «f the, flpag?, can ?©©&1E In tbe 3.800 degrees of colonrless flame a liuman body years in the making becomes a small canful of gray limp ash in 75 minutes. ' Everything else has disappeared, even the metal casket con* plgtely tp its s©rews, Twelve minute© after the flames surge over the casket there is visible thrpngh th© roaring hell pf fire a t|in, dprk Hne f FffR^f down the square end of the metal casket. It is a crpck gradnally widening from the tep until ■nddenly the casket ©plits and drops

aside like an eggshell. A swift cloud of blaek smoke slaps the inside of the peephole at the- rear of the oven, blotting vision away and etartliug the watcher. At the same time the roa? oi the burner drops to a deeper pitch and a distinct trambling rumbles like a proIpnged earthquake through. -tke.heavy masonry of the. building. The bursting casket has tlxrown .explosiye volumes oi gas into the oven and this is the danger point. Flames must swiffly be reduced and the air jets opened wide uniil the gases have passed up the buildings chimney:tower. There is a period " of minutes after the shuddering has died away when npthing can be seen through the peephole. After a timo the'thick soot thins under the heat and visibility returns. Your porpse within the oven is disintegrating slowly, ine?orably, in the white oxidation of flre. The ef^ept is a melting, more sensed than seen through the obscuring flames, in which silho.uettes come and go, shrunk smaller at each reappearanee, It is a thing to be watphed impersonally, your corpse's end, for it is the stu£ from which nightmares a?e mado. Seventy-five minutes* the bnrnera. roar. On the floor of the oven is an uneven layer of gray ash from which curve? upward parts of yonr skeleton frame, reduced to lime ash, yet clinging to the form you had alive before crumbling rpluctantly as you cool. Twenty-four hpnrs later the oven is broached, the ashes pulverised and swept into a copppr nrn costing 12/-. pnd yon are npthing but the memories you have left behiud.