There were few mourners. Only the professional wailers, and the rebeck player, who with bent head, followed the bier making mournful music as he went. Âtma, of another creed, still held aloof, walking veiled and stately some way behind. And all around them slipping aside to let the dead pass, for the most part careless almost unheeding, were the living; buying, selling, gossiping, chaffering.
Âtma drew breath more freely when they were through the city gates, and the bearers stepped out more quickly over hard stretches of sand and waste hillocks set with thorn and caper bushes toward the little cemetery which the musician had chosen. A few gnarled jhand trees decked with coloured snippets of cloth tied there by many mourners, a few nameless roly-poly concrete graves, a sprinkling of tiny turrets showing where someone was laid--someone whose resting place was unknown to all save the women who came thither every week to mourn--marked the spot. A dreary lonesome spot, in truth. But the westering sun showed warm and red over the desert horizon, and the chipping notes of the seven-brother birds sounded cheerful as the family flitted from one tree to another.
The grave was already dug and the diggers stood by waiting for their day's pay. It was a wide deep grave, looking as if it had been cut out of yellow rock, so dry, so even were the sides. And the low arch of the long niche on one side in which the corpse was to be laid as in a coffin, was as regular as if built in with unburnt brick. To Âtma's surprise, the floor of this niche was set thick, as by a coverlet, with roses. She glanced hastily at the rebeck player, but he was already immersed in the prayers with which an attendant priest had greeted the little procession. She listened gravely, repeating to herself meanwhile the formulas--so few, so simple--of her own creed.
And yet when, after saying aloud the prayer for benediction, the rebeck-player stood forward, raised the sad gracious figure from the coffin, and stepping into the grave laid it gently in the niche, she shivered as she saw him stoop to gather up a handful of earth.
"We created you of dust and we return you to dust, and we shall raise you out of the dust upon the day of resurrection."
The words seemed to her almost horrible. To be left lying alone in the desert, waiting, waiting, waiting!
For what? For yourself--the old mean self of which she was so tired.
Ah! better surely to find rest at once in the Great Self which pervaded all things!
"Wilt thou not throw earth also?" said a voice beside her, "then throw flowers. These are the roses of love."
The rebeck player pulled aside the kerchief covering a flat basket which one of the Dom women had carried, and lo! there were roses red at their hearts, pale where the sun had kissed them. Their scent filled the air.