Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 5.djvu/213

187 Into this pit they threw the coffin, then tying a rope of palm-fibres under the husband’s armpits, they let him down into the cavern, and with him a great pitcher of fresh water and seven cakes of bread. When he came to the bottom, he did himself loose from the rope and they drew it up; then stopping the mouth of the pit with the stone, they returned to the city, leaving my friend in the cavern with his dead wife. When I saw this, I said in myself, “By Allah, this kind of death is more horrible than the first.” And I went in to the King and said to him, “O my lord, why do ye bury the live with the dead?” Quoth he, “It has been our custom, from time immemorial, if the husband die first, to bury his wife with him, and the like with the wife, if her husband die first,husband, if his wife die first, [sic] so we may not sever them, alive or dead.” “O King of the age,” asked I, “if the wife of a foreigner like myself die among you, deal ye with him as with yonder man?” “Assuredly,” answered he; “we do with him even as thou hast seen.” When I heard this, my gall-bladder was like to burst, for the violence of my dismay and concern for myself; my wit became dazed and I went in fear lest my wife should die before me and they bury me alive with her. However, after a while, I comforted myself, saying, “Haply I shall die before her, for none knoweth which shall go first and which follow.”

Then I applied myself to diverting my mind from this thought with various occupations; but it was not long before my wife sickened and died, after a few days’ illness, and the King and the rest of the folk came to condole with me and her family for her loss. Then they washed her and arraying her in her richest clothes and ornaments, laid her on the bier and carried her to the mountain aforesaid, where they lifted the cover of the pit and cast her in; after which all my friends and acquaintances came round me, to