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day are badly off and have to put up with more humiliations than even
the Hindus. But still they have left many memorials behind them, and,
amongst others, their cemeteries. The Mussulman fidelity to the dead is
a very touching feature of their character. Their devotion to those
that are gone is always more demonstrative than their affection for
the living members of their families, and almost entirely concentrates
itself on their last abodes. In proportion as their notions of paradise
are coarse and material, the appearance of their cemeteries is poetical,
especially in India. One may pleasantly spend whole hours in these
shady, delightful gardens, amongst their white monuments crowned with
turbans, covered with roses and jessamine and sheltered with rows of
cypresses. We often stopped in such places to sleep and dine. A cemetery
near Thalner is especially attractive. Out of several mausoleums in a
good state of preservation the most magnificent is the monument of the
family of Kiladar, who was hanged on the city tower by the order of
General Hislop in 1818. Four other mausoleums attracted our attention
and we learned that one of them is celebrated throughout India. It is a
white marble octagon, covered from top to bottom with carving, the
like of which could not be found even in Pere La Chaise. A Persian
inscription on its base records that it cost one hundred thousand
rupees.

By day, bathed in the hot rays of the sun, its tall minaret-like outline
looks like a block of ice against the blue sky. By night, with the aid
of the intense, phosphorescent moonlight proper to India, it is still
more dazzling and poetical. The summit looks as if it were covered with
freshly fallen snow-crystals. Raising its slender profile above the dark
background of bushes, it suggests some pure midnight apparition, soaring
over this silent abode of destruction and lamenting what will never
return. Side by side with these cemeteries rise the Hindu ghats,
generally by the river bank. There really is something grand in the
ritual of burning the dead. Witnessing this ceremony the spectator is
struck with the deep philosophy underlying the fundamental idea of this
custom. In the course of an hour nothing remains of the body but a
few handfuls of ashes. A professional Brahman, like a priest of death,
scatters these ashes to the winds over a river. The ashes of what once
lived and felt, loved and hated, rejoiced and wept, are thus given back