Edgar Degas Beach Scene painting

Edgar Degas Beach Scene paintingEdgar Degas Ballerina and Lady with a Fan paintingEdgar Degas At the Milliners painting
You mean there's only one immortal at a time?"
"Oh, no," she said. "There are others all around. In the ground. Sometimes people find them. Souvenirs. The really old ones. Ours is young, you know." She looked at the Immortal with a weary but proprietary eye, the way a mother looks at an unpromising infant.
"The diamonds?" I said. "The diamonds are immortals?"
She nodded. "After a really long time," she said. She looked away, across the marshy plain that surrounded the village, and then back at me. "A man came from the mainland, last year, a scientist. He said we ought to bury our Immortal. So it could turn to diamond, you know. But then he said it takes thousands of years to turn. All that time it would be starving and thirsty in the ground and nobody would look after it. It is wrong to bury a person alive. It is our family duty to look after it. And no tourists would come."
It was my turn to nod. The ethics of this