The island is quite pretty and is covered with fruit and other gardens. Outside the city, and close to the border of the desert, are the tombs of the Barghite Sultans, which are generally called, though erroneously, the tombs of the Caliphs. The real burying places of the Caliphs of Cairo are in the city, not far from the bazaars, and in the busiest part of this very busy capital.
The Moslem awaits death with the utmost composure. When a learned or pious Moslem feels that he is about to die, he performs the ordinary ablution, as before prayer, that he may depart from life in a state of bodily purity; and he generally repeats the profession of his faith. It is not uncommon for a Moslem on a military expedition, or during a long journey through the desert, to carry his grave linen with him. It often happens that a traveler in such circumstances has even to make his own grave; completely overcome by fatigue or privation, or sinking under a fatal disease in the desert, when his companions, if he have any, cannot wait for his recovery or death, he performs the ablution, with water, if possible, or, if not with sand or dust which is allowable in such case, and then having made a trench in the sand as his grave, lies down in it wrapped in his grave clothes, and covers himself with the exception of his face with this and taken up in making the trench: thus he waits for death to relieve him, trusting to the wind to complete his burial.
The ceremonies attendant upon death and burial are nearly the same in the cases of men and women. When the rattles in the throat, or other symptoms, show that a man is at the point of death, an attendant turns him round to place his face in the direction of Mecca, and closes his eyes.
Many of the tombs of the Turkish grandees have marble tarkeebehs which are canopied by cupolas supported by four columns of marble. There are numerous tombs of this description in the cemetery at Cairo We were rather disappointed in our visit to the tombs of the Sultans. They were originally very handsome, but are now in a very ruinous condition, and they bid fair to be altogether destroyed before many years. There were two or three with lofty domes and minarets, quite like the mosques of Cairo. They were really intended as mosques, in connection with the tombs, so as to furnish praying places for the faithful whenever they wished to pay respect to the dead.
From the outside and at a little distance they present a fine effect, with their backing of sand-covered hills and the general surroundings of approaching desolation. Inside we found portions of the smaller walls torn away to be used in other buildings, and in one of the mosques, cows and donkeys were stabled. The windows were broken and ragged. The floors were dirty and the attendants were noisy Arabs, who seemed to have no other object in remaining there than the collection of “backsheesh,” in which they were most persistent.
At the cemetery near these tombs we saw a funeral procession and followed it, out of curiosity. Half a dozen men, some of them blind, and each resting a hand on the shoulder of another, led the way and chanted a melancholy air. Then came a man with a small coffin borne on his head, and behind him were half a dozen women and as many boys, the women closely veiled according to the custom of the country.
The procession did not move in couples, according to the Occidental custom; there was no observance of regularity, except that the men were in front of the coffin and the women and boys behind it. They moved through the country to a spot where a grave had been opened; near it the women stopped and sat down, and the bearers placed the coffin on the ground, a priest uttered a prayer, and then the man who had brought the coffin—a sort of oblong box, with a shawl over it—removed the shawl, and took from beneath it the corpse.