DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.12664#0075
68
INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL.
Jay a little apart before the gro ip of mourners,
who sat on the bank above it, with their eyes turn-
ed towards it, weeping, and apparently talking to
it. The women were the most conspicuous among
the mourners. The dead man had been more
happy in his connexions than I imagine the Arabs
generally are, if all the women sitting there were
really mourning his death. Whether they were
real mourners, or whether they were merely going
through the formal part of an Egyptian funeral
ceremony, I cannot say • but the big tears rolled
down their cheeks,, and their cries sounded like the
overflowings of distressed hearts. A death and
burial scene is at any time solemn, and I do not
know that it loses any of its solemnity even when
the scene is on the banks of the Nile, and the sub-
ject a poor and oppressed Arab. Human affection
probably glows as warmly here as under a gilded
loof, and I am disposed to be charitable to the ex-
hibition that I now beheld ; but I could not help no-
ticing that the cries became louder as I approach-
ed, and I had hardly seated myself at a little dis-
tance from the corpse, before the women seemed
to be completely carried away by their grief, and
with loud cries, tearing their hair and beating their
breasts, threw out their arms towards the corpse,,
and prayed, and wept, and then turned away with
shrieks piteous enough to touch the heart of tlx®,
dead.
The general territorial division of Egypt, from
tkae immemorial, has been into upp©r and iowei j
INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL.
Jay a little apart before the gro ip of mourners,
who sat on the bank above it, with their eyes turn-
ed towards it, weeping, and apparently talking to
it. The women were the most conspicuous among
the mourners. The dead man had been more
happy in his connexions than I imagine the Arabs
generally are, if all the women sitting there were
really mourning his death. Whether they were
real mourners, or whether they were merely going
through the formal part of an Egyptian funeral
ceremony, I cannot say • but the big tears rolled
down their cheeks,, and their cries sounded like the
overflowings of distressed hearts. A death and
burial scene is at any time solemn, and I do not
know that it loses any of its solemnity even when
the scene is on the banks of the Nile, and the sub-
ject a poor and oppressed Arab. Human affection
probably glows as warmly here as under a gilded
loof, and I am disposed to be charitable to the ex-
hibition that I now beheld ; but I could not help no-
ticing that the cries became louder as I approach-
ed, and I had hardly seated myself at a little dis-
tance from the corpse, before the women seemed
to be completely carried away by their grief, and
with loud cries, tearing their hair and beating their
breasts, threw out their arms towards the corpse,,
and prayed, and wept, and then turned away with
shrieks piteous enough to touch the heart of tlx®,
dead.
The general territorial division of Egypt, from
tkae immemorial, has been into upp©r and iowei j