When first I arrived at Cairo the funerals that daily passed under
my windows were many, but still there were frequent and long
intervals without a single howl. Every day, however (except one,
when I fancied that I observed a diminution of funerals), these
intervals became less frequent and shorter, and at last, the
passing of the howlers from morn till noon was almost incessant. I
believe that about one-half of the whole people was carried off by
this visitation. The Orientals, however, have more quiet fortitude
than Europeans under afflictions of this sort, and they never allow
the plague to interfere with their religious usages. I rode one
day round the great burial-ground. The tombs are strewed over a
great expanse, among the vast mountains of rubbish (the
accumulations of many centuries) which surround the city. The
ground, unlike the Turkish "cities of the dead," which are made so
beautiful by their dark cypresses, has nothing to sweeten
melancholy, nothing to mitigate the odiousness of death.
Carnivorous beasts and birds possess the place by night, and now in
the fair morning it was all alive with fresh comers--alive with
dead. Yet at this very time, when the plague was raging so
furiously, and on this very ground, which resounded so mournfully
with the howls of arriving funerals, preparations were going on for
the religious festival called the Kourban Bairam.
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