City of the Dead

“ Another class look with profound melancholy on that great city of the dead,—the burial-place of all that ever lived in the past,—which occupies with its ever-extending pavements of gravestones, and its ever-lengthening streets of tombs and sepulchres, every region opened up by the geologist. They see the onward procession of being as if but tipped with life, and nought but inanimate carcasses all behind,—dead individuals, dead species, dead genera, dead creations,—a universe of death ”

“ Only an arid waste, dotted over by an irregular encampment of the narrow mansions of the dead, the round hummocks of blistered clay, each with its upright stone, its shahed, capped with turban or tarboosh. The barren nakedness and savage aridity of the place make it a melancholy spectacle by day, but in the silence of night, under the moon's quiet eye, or with the darkness flushed by the white light of the stars, the wild desolation of the city of the dead is an awesome sight. ”

“ The street-lamps burn amid the baleful glooms, Amidst the soundless solitudes immense Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs. 45 The silence which benumbs or strains the sense Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping: Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping, Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence! Yet as in some necropolis you find 50 Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead, So there: worn faces that look deaf and blind Like tragic masks of stone. ”

“ We are in the "city of the dead." The wind sighs through the waving branches of the trees, with a mournful melody, suggestive of the place. Near by is the bustling city, but here we are surrounded only by the mute, though eloquent testimonies of man's eternal rest. ”

“ Doubtless the city must have been crammed with the dead! There must have been corpses at the thresholds of the garden gates, upon the stairways, in all the chambers, and piled up so high that the doors could no longer move upon their hinges!... ”

“ With him are his sister, Beata Maria, and their friends Alessandro and Anna his wife, a cluster of human flowers, full of living charm and sap, transplanted into the ‘dead city.’ But the dead city is not merely dead; it is mysteriously fraught with the power of the vanished past to control the present and the future. Its mouldering ruins are the arena of a struggle between Death and Life, in which death triumphs and life receives the mortal blow. ”

“ Chuang-tsze walked by the skirts of the mountain, absorbed in thought—he suddenly came among many tombs—the city of the dead. “Here then,” he exclaimed, “all are upon a level—caste is unknown—the philosopher and the fool sleep, side by side. This is eternity! From the sepulchre there is no return!”
He strolled among the tombs; and, erelong, perceived a grave, that had been recently made. The mound of moistened clay was not yet thoroughly dry. By the side of that grave sat a young woman, clad in the deepest mourning. ”

“ The silence of death and of ruin rests over this once and but so lately populous city. As I stood upon a high point which overlooked a large extent of it, I could discern no signs of life, except here and there a detachment of the Roman guard dragging forth the bodies of the slaughtered citizens, and bearing them to be burned or buried. This whole people is extinct. In a single day these hundred thousands have found a common grave. Not one remains to bewail or bury the dead. ”

“ THEY bury their dead in vaults, above the ground. These vaults have a resemblance to houses—sometimes to temples; are built of marble, generally; are architecturally graceful and shapely; they face the walks and driveways of the cemetery; and when one moves through the midst of a thousand or so of them and sees their white roofs and gables stretching into the distance on every hand, the phrase 'city of the dead' has all at once a meaning to him. Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order. ”

“ Her heart grew heavy as lead at the thought that this stranger, by whose pillow she was watching, might be the sole survivor in that forsaken palace, and that in a few more hours he, too, would be numbered with the dead, in that dreadful city where Death reigned omnipotent, and where the living seemed but a vanishing minority, pale shadows of living creatures passing silently along one inevitable pathway to the pest-house or pit. ”

“ The shining tombs and vaults and monuments, tier above tier, towering at the end of the city, flaunt in one’s face the remorselessness and the greed of death. In winter, the paths are running brooks; one imagines that the very dead are soaked. ”

“ From year to year, however, bodies are added to those already buried, the disgusting state of overcrowding which I described minutely, with all its evils, shows itself, and then one of two things happens: either the remains of those buried before are ruthlessly dug up by the sexton’s spade and thrown into the mud whenever a new grave is made, or all of the bodies are exhumed and taken away; the soil is parcelled, and the new generation takes possession of the “city of the dead.” ”

“ And, moreover, Charmion, I tell you a thought haunts me which terrifies me. In other lands of the earth, corpses are burned, and their ashes soon mingle with the soil. Here, it is said that the living have no other occupation than that of preserving the dead. Potent balms save them from destruction; the remains endure after the soul has evaporated. Beneath this people lie twenty peoples; each city stands upon twenty layers of necropoli; each generation which passes away leaves a population of mummies to a shadowy city. ”

“ And indeed in those houseless night walks—which even included cemeteries where watchmen went round among the graves at stated times, and moved the tell-tale handle of an index which recorded that they had touched it at such an hour—it was a solemn consideration what enormous hosts of dead belong to one old great city, and how, if they were raised while the living slept, there would not be the space of a pin's point in all the streets and ways for the living to come out into. ”

“ A terrible epidemic went from city to city; men died off helplessly, irremediably; a brief moment put an end to their lives; the young and healthy to-day were corpses on the morrow. Already there were more graves than houses; the living no longer sufficed to bury their dead. ”

“ The Orientals, however, have more quiet fortitude than Europeans under afflictions of this sort, and they never allow the plague to interfere with their religious usages. I rode one day round the great burial-ground. The tombs are strewed over a great expanse, among the vast mountains of rubbish (the accumulations of many centuries) which surround the city. The ground, unlike the Turkish “cities of the dead,” which are made so beautiful by their dark cypresses, has nothing to sweeten melancholy, nothing to mitigate the odiousness of death. ”

“ I don’t see any telegraph station, and there’s not a messenger boy in sight.”
“That’s funny,” said Ned. “You’d think a buried city, a dead one, so to speak, would be just the place where a district messenger would like to come to rest.”
“It’s a lonesome place here,” remarked Bob. “I hope we’ll find some one to talk to.”
“That’s just the beauty of the place,” said the professor. “What good would an ancient, ruined, buried city be if people were living in it? I hope there isn’t a soul here but ourselves.”
“I guess you’ll get your desire, all right,” remarked Jerry. ”

“ It was a wonderful thing to think for how many thousands of years the dead orb above and the dead city below had gazed thus upon each other, and in the utter solitude of space poured forth each to each the tale of their lost life and long-departed glory. The white light fell, and minute by minute the quiet shadows crept across the grass-grown courts like the spirits of old priests haunting the habitations of their worship—the white light fell, and the long shadows grew till the beauty and grandeur of each scene and the untamed majesty of its present Death seemed to sink into our very souls, and speak more loudly than the shouts of armies concerning the pomp and splendour that the grave had swallowed, and even memory had forgotten. ”

“ The hotels, shipyards, and stores were closed, bodies rudely nailed up in boards were hurried about the streets, and met with hasty burial outside the city, before vital warmth had fled; the holy ties of natural affection were disregarded, and the dying were left alone to meet the King of Terrors, none remaining to close their eyes; the ominous clang of the death-bell was heard both night and day, and a dense brown fog was supposed to brood over the city, which for five weeks was the abode of the dying and the dead.
A temporary regard for religion was produced among the inhabitants of St. ”

“ Some of the faculty were consulted, in this city, about thirty years ago, upon the question of burying under churches; and, on the strength of the opinion given, a large church, not then finished, was provided with tombs, and the dead have been buried therein, ever since. Now I think the public good would have been advanced, had those doctors set their faces against the selfish proposition. That it is a nuisance, I entertain not the slightest doubt. The practice of burying in their own houses, among the ancients, gave place to burying without the city, or to cremation. ”

“ It is also most devoutly to be wished, for the health, comfort, and decency of the metropolis, that all, or at least the majority of the burying grounds, were ordered to be formed in some dry spots of ground at the different extremities of the city; and that the dead were more detached from the living. ”

“ And in order that the bodies of the dead should not be thus impiously and barbarously treated and then transported to the places in which, while alive, they had selected to be buried, let them be given sepulture for the time either in the city or the camp or in the place where they have died, or in some neighboring place, so that, when finally their bodies have been reduced to ashes or otherwise, they may be brought to the place where they wish to be buried and there be interred. ”

“ But while death seems far more astonishing and unnatural in a city, where the great tide of life rises and falls with little apparent regard to the sinking wrecks, in the country it is not so. The neighbors themselves are those who dig the grave and carry the dead, whom they or their friends have made ready, to the last resting-place. ”

“ In the tombs—which, as I have stated, is the most offensive and mischievous mode of burial. I have already alluded to some instances of traffic, connected with certain tombs, in the Chapel yard. If some plan be not adopted, a new line of business will spring up, in which the members of my profession will figure, to some extent: many of the present owners of tombs will sell out, and move their dead to Mount Auburn, or Forest Hills; and the city tombs will be crammed with as many corpses, as they can hold, by their speculating proprietors. ”

“ The moment that contact with the dead bodies became less fatally infectious, help offered on all sides, tempted by the large rewards. The dead rapidly disappeared from sight, and the city began to resume something of its ordinary appearance. ”

“ What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over ”

“ The dust, that fell unnoted as a dew,
Wrapped the dead city's face like mummy-cloth:
All is as was: except for worm and moth. ”

“ The old yards up and down the old street were much trampled, shrubbery broken, fences down, the street thick dust, and still strewn with accoutrements that had been thrown away, with here and there a broken wagon. Street and pavement, there was passing and repassing—the life of the rear of an army, and the faring to and fro on many errands of the people of the relieved town. There were the hospitals and there were the wounded in private houses. There were the dead, and all the burials for the morrow—the negroes digging in the old graveyard, and the children gathering flowers. ”

“ A committee was appointed to visit the spot. Upon drawing near, subdued laughter and the sounds of vulgar merriment arose, from one of the tombs—a light was seen glimmering from below—the strong odor, not of corruption, but of mutton chops, filled the air. Some vagabonds had cleared the tomb, and taken possession, and, with broken coffins for fuel, had found an appetite, among the dead. The occupation of tombs, by the outcasts of society, was common, long before the Christian era.
That the living have been buried, unintentionally, now and then, is undoubtedly true. ”

“ The burial-grounds were regarded with awe and fear, for sometimes a restless ghost would break bounds and spread sickness among the inhabitants of the neighbourhood. Within their sacred precincts stood altars or stages for offerings to the gods, and any living man who entered them did so at his peril. For the same reason no one would set foot in a house where a dead man or woman had been buried. Hence in nearly every village half the houses stood empty and deserted, falling into decay, tenanted only by ghosts. The living had constantly before their eyes the mansions of the dead. ”

“ Much has been said and written, of late, here and elsewhere, on the subject of intra mural interment—burial within the walls or confines of cities. This term, though commonly employed by British writers, is wholly inapplicable, in all those rural cities, which have recently sprung up among us, and in which there are still many broad acres of meadow and pasture, plough-land and forest. In these almost nominal cities, the question must be, in relation to the propriety of burying the dead, not within the confines, but in the more densely peopled portions—in the very midst of the living. ”