Page:Sixteen years of an artist's life in Morocco, Spain and the Canary Islands.djvu/80

 viz., the well Zemzem, the Kaaba, or house of God, and the Black Stone. The repulsive melancholy of this gloomy cemetery was scarcely dispelled by a few feeble flowers, almost gasping for life, and by one or two withering fig-trees, blasted by the easterly winds that tell so severely on all kinds of vegetation in this part of the world.

On the following day, however, which was Friday, the Moorish Sabbath, the place presented an entirely different, although I can scarcely call it a more pleasing, appearance. It was occupied by crowds of women, all dressed in white, and in such a locality looking like so many ghosts, or at least like what we consider ghosts in England. In all the agony of bereavement, some were beating their breasts, and invoking the departed in piercing tones of anguish, while others, prostrated beside graves which had evidently not been long closed over the dead, called in the most endearing terms that the glowing imaginations of these children of the sun can suggest on the lost friend or relative to wait for them. Another brings fresh flowers to adorn the grave of a departed husband, and while she lingers at the sad spot where her heart lies buried, she tells him that life is now a burden to her, that the world can no longer attract her by its pleasures, and that her most