AT THE CEMETERY[20]
"Come with me," he said, "that you may see the contrast between poverty and riches, between the great and the humble, even among the ranks of the dead;—for verily it hath been said that there are sermons in stones."
And I passed with him through the Egyptian gates, and beyond the pylons into the Alley of Cypresses; and he showed me the dwelling-place of the rich in the City of Eternal Sleep—the ponderous tombs of carven marble, the white angels that mourned in stone, the pale symbols of the urns, and the names inscribed upon tablets of granite in letters of gold. But I said to him: "These things interest me not;—these tombs are but traditions of the wealth once owned by men who dwell now where riches avail nothing and all rest together in the dust."
Then my friend laughed softly to himself, and taking my hand led me to a shadowy place where the trees bent under their drooping burdens of gray moss, and made waving silhouettes against the catacombed walls which girdle the cemetery. There the dead were numbered and piled away thickly upon the marble shelves, like those documents which none may destroy but which few care to read—the Archives of our Necropolis. And he pointed to a marble tablet closing the aperture of one of the little compartments in the lowest range of the catacombs, almost level with the grass at our feet.
There was no inscription, no name, no wreath, no vase. But some hand had fashioned a tiny flower-bed in front of the tablet—a little garden about twelve inches in width and depth—and had hemmed it about with a border of pink-tinted seashells, and had covered the black mould over with white sand, through which the green leaves and buds of the baby plants sprouted up.
"Nothing but love could have created that," said my companion, as a shadow of tenderness passed over his face;—"and that sand has been brought here from a long distance, and from the shores of the sea."
Then I looked and remembered wastes that I had seen, where sand-waves shifted with a dry and rustling sound, where no life was and no leaf grew, where all was death and barrenness. And here were flowers blooming in the midst of sand!—the desert blossoming!—love living in the midst of death! And I saw the print of a hand, a child's hand—the tiny Angers that had made this poor little garden and smoothed the sand over the roots of the flowers.
"There is no name upon the tomb," said the voice of the friend who stood beside me; "yet why should there be?"