And they were the rulers of the pueblo of San Diego.
XII.
All Saints’ Day.
The cemetery of San Diego is in the midst of rice-fields. It is approached by a narrow path, powdery on sunny days, navigable on rainy. A wooden gate and a wall half stone, half bamboo stalks, succeed in keeping out men, but not the curate’s goats, nor the pigs of his neighbors. In the middle of the enclosure is a stone pedestal supporting a great wooden cross. Storms have bent the strip of tin on which were the I. N. R. I., and the rain has washed off the letters. At the foot of the cross is a confused heap of bones and skulls thrown out by the grave-digger. Everywhere grow in all their vigor the bitter-sweet and rose-bay. Some tiny flowerets, too, tint the ground—blossoms which, like the mounded bones, are known to their Creator only. They are like little pale smiles, and their odor scents of the tomb. Grass and climbing plants fill the corners, cover the walls, adorning this otherwise bare ugliness; they even penetrate the tombs, through earthquake fissures, and fill their yawning gaps.
At this hour two men are digging near the crumbling wall. One, the grave-digger, works with the utmost indifference, throwing aside a skull as a gardener would a stone. The other is preoccupied; he perspires, he breathes hard.
“Oh!” he says at length in Tagalo. “Hadn’t we better dig in some other place? This grave is too recent.”
“All the graves are the same, one is as recent as another.”
“I can’t endure this!”
“What a woman! You should go and be a clerk! If you had dug up, as I did, a boy of twenty days, at night, in the rain——”