at his feet, and the other at his head. In a
searching voice they demand the dead Mussulman's
opinions as to the unity of God, the
mission of Mohammed, and the truth of the
Koran.

If the dead man answer well, the black
angels depart, and he falls into a balmy sleep,
fanned by the breath of paradise; but, if he
have infidel or Jewish tenets, those angels beat
him on the temples with their maces till his
cries are heard all through the world and by all
creatures save the accursed genii; and his great
sins changing into dragons with seven heads,
and snakes, and his peccadilloes into scorpions,
lie is thrown among them, and is stung, and
bitten, and tortured until the resurrection.

Need I say that some of these undertaker
legends— easy to believe as they appear— have
sceptics who reject them? Indeed, there are
many opinions in Turkey among the religious
and the learned as to the abiding-place
of the soul, after the body, its house, has
gone to ruins. Some say that it remains lingering
near the grave of its lost companion
— a supposition which even in Europe has
originated countless ghost stories. Others,
not unadvisedly, say that the souls of Mohammedan
martyrs become green birds in the gardens
of heaven; that others rest in the fountains of
Eden; that the souls of the rest of the good are
placed in the trumpet of the Archangel; that the
bad remaining prisoners lie under the Devil's
lower jaw. About all these things which pass
the sense, the Koran readers have doubts; but
they all agree that one obscure and dishonoured
bone of the human anatomy— the os coccygis—
is alone indestructible, and that from it, at the
last day, after two months of heavy rain, will
sprout up the body, the germ of which is in that
bone, as the flower is in the seed.

It is, therefore, for the kind purpose of letting
the dead man sit up and pass his examination
that the Turk is buried without a coffin,
and that is why his grave so often cracks,
gapes, and falls in: much to the horror of all
but undertakers, and much to the comfort and
convenience of the wild dogs. To shorten
the period of suspense before the examination
(when the soul is said to be in pain), is why the
Turks, usually so grave and slow, run at a
funeral; and why, as if drank with joy, they
rush down steep and stony streets with their
burden, dreading all the time lest poor Mustapha
may have to eat of the tree Zaccoum,
whose roots fill hell, whose fruit resembles the
head of devils, and on which the lost are to
feed, with a drink of boiling and sulphurous
water.

Another cause of the Turkish grave falling in,
is the custom of leaving a hole in the earth extending
from where the corpse lies, to the surface,
a dangerous practice, giving the dead a weapon
with which to kill the living, and bring them to
their own condition. This hole is said to be left
in case the dead man wish to make any communication,
but I believe the truth to be, that it is a
remembrance of the old custom of the Greeks
and Romans (and probably the men of the
Lower Empire), of leaving a hole in the upper
floor of some of their double-roofed tombs to
pour down libations of honey, milk, and wine,
as offerings to the dead man's manes. It was
these manes that Christianity invested in semi-Pagan
times with demoniac life and power, and
turned into ghosts. It is to remove the danger
of such breathing places of pestilence more
terrible than even London pews built over festering
vaults— that the cypresses were planted
originally in Mohammedan burial-grounds: the
aromatic odour of those resinous mournful trees
being thought to neutralise all exhalations. But
the shrewd infidel has taken wiser means than
this, of avoiding pestilence; he does not line his
thickly-peopled streets with dead bodies, nor does
he fill up the chinks between his close-packed
buildings with corpses; he takes his dead far
away outside his walled city, across the Bosphorus,
or to treed slopes high above the sea— to wide
tracts outside the ramparts— or to the sides of
hills, looking down upon the breezy harbour.

In every rite connected with the dead, the Turk
differs from the Englishman. He refrains as far
as possible from burying near a great city. Dead
Ali does not crawl to the grave with hypocritical
hirelings, but friends bear him on their shoulders,
quick and cheerfully; partly, because they think
the dead man's soul is suffering until it undergo
its examination; partly, because the Koran says
that a man carrying the corpse of a true believer,
even forty paces, obtains the expiation of
several sins. The Turks do not burn coffins, so as
to make room where there is no room, but they
never bury twice in the same place, if they have
any proof of previous interment. Severe predestinarians,
they never lament a death. They do
not call it a loss, or a misfortune, or become
inconsolable, or faint and talk of the
"dear departed," or write flowery epitaphs on
rogues and money-lenders, but they say it was
ordained, it was God's will, and therefore must be
right; and all they do is to sing verses of the
Koran, and heap blessings on the head of the
chief mourner.

They bury the dead at the hour of prayer,
either at noon or sunset. The body is then
brought to the mosque, and followed by the congregation,
or part of it, to the grave. Friday,
the Moslem Sunday, is the women's day of
mourning. Then, you see veiled mourners, faceless
as Banshees, bowing and rocking over the
earthen mounds, watching the jasmine flower or
the rose, with its "paradise of leaves" set in the
little chiselled-out saucers on the tombstones,
that are scooped for that special purpose. Just
after the muezzin has chanted out his summons
to prayer from the high balcony of the minaret,
I have met the lively funerals at these appointed
times, but I never dared to follow the Moslem to
his last resting-place, because it would have
polluted a true believer's grave. How can I,
who have been in various countries treated thus
intolerantly, ever myself be again intolerant?

But let me get to my actualities. What sort
of a place is this great burial-ground of