an enchanter's rod, and, waving it over the
burial-ground of Scutari, bid the vast army of
dead arise and defile before us.

Then should I have selected a class of the turbaned
dead, and examined them in Turkish history
because, when I get imbecile and shaky,
and incapable of invention, I intend to turn historian.
There, out of that million or so of white
faces, I should have met men who had driven
the fifty pair of sluggish oxen that had dragged
the great cannon of the conqueror Mohammed;
men who had headed the twelve thousand
Janissaries who poured through the Seraglio
gardens, and forced Mohammed's heir, Bajazet,
to surrender the throne to his fierce brother,
Selim, the conqueror of Egypt. This first class
dismissed, I should then have selected from
that great sea of staring faces, rude soldiers
in whose arms Soliman the Magnificent had died
in his tent before a besieged Hungarian fortress,
and galley-slaves who had pulled with gory hands
at the Turkish vessels flying from Lepanto to
bear the news to Selim the Second. Nor would
I here have been satisfied; for that snake-rod
should wave inexorably till I had heard truly
how Amurath warred in Poland, and Mahmoud
in Hungary; how Achmet signed an inglorious
peace; how Mustapha was deposed, and Osman.
murdered.

Class after class I would have called up,
hearing in that place of graves "strange stories
of the death of kings," and all the phases of a
dynasty which, as I have heard the Greeks say,
"came in with the sword and will go out with
the knife." I should have insisted on knowing
why Amurath the drunken, tormented Persia so,
and why Ibrahim was bow-strung? Whether
Sobieski defeating Mohammed the Fourth's
army really saved Christendom, or Prince Eugene's
great victory on the Theiss in 1697?

Nor would I have dismissed, indeed, that great
yawning multitude to their dry clay beds before I
had severely cross-examined them. I should ask
if that hot madman Charles the Twelfth really
tore the silk robe of Achmet the Third's vizier,
because he would declare peace with Peter the
Great; why (I should insist on clear answers),
why Mahmoud made peace with Austria at
Belgrade; and why Mustapha the Third allowed
Russia to conquer the Crimea so easily; and no,
not if they grew ever so impatient, would I let
the last men sneak back to their narrow homes
before I heard whether Selim the Third was
much beaten by the Austrians at Belgrade in
1790; and lastly, whether the twenty thousand
Janissaries put to death by Mahmoud, the
father of the present Sultan (hundreds of them
are here, resting under their defaced tombs),
deserved their fate or not— because Admiral
Slade tells me they were the defenders of
Turkish liberties, and my other friend, Herne
Bey, says they were rebels, and murderers, and
robbers to a man. Which am I to believe?

But now, dismissing my turbaned spectres to
their narrow beds under the dark trees that
know no spring, let me describe, both by
showing what it is like and what it is not, the
great Scutari resting-place of the bulk of the
Turkish nation. But first, let everybody dismiss
all thoughts of the " God's acre" of the
English country church. There is no funeral
yew-tree here, with dotted red pulpy berries, like
a hearse plume sprinkled with blood; there is no
mossy tracery round old Gothic windows that
are gold-plated with the sun, or silver-frosted
with the moon; there is no old stone nest of a
tower for dead monks' bells; there are no
mouldy chapels, with smell of grave about them,
where alabaster knights lie recumbent with ever
clasped hands,

As for past sins they would atone,
By saying endless prayers in stone.

There are no green rank growths of grass
between the turfen mounds where the village
boys play. All here is wide and national; no
man can say "I will lie among my kindred."
The Turk has no quiet, peaceful contemplations
about the grave; to him it is a place of terrible
purgation, a prison, a spot of horror and fear
after life's fitful fever.

The Turk— not from the Koran, but from
one of those doubtful traditions of the Prophet
which are so numerous and so rabbinical believes
that when Mustapha, his father, or Hassan,
his son, is dying, Azrael, the terrible angel
of death, approaches the man's bed with his
sword drawn. At the point of this blade are three
drops of gall, which the dying man swallows:
the first turns him pale: the second kills him,
and with the third decomposition begins.
Death, who with us is a skeleton, clattering like
castanets as he moves, and leading off, now the
old man, now the child, is, with the vague and
more imaginative Turks, a cloudy-winged gigantic
angel, striking with his sword, now the sultan
on his throne, now the serf at the plough.

Not but that the loving mother or wife, in
Turkey, as in England, is often to be seen
weeping over the grave; but I mean to say
that, while the English woman sees angels
hovering round her as she mourns, ministering
to her with words of compassion, soothing, and
hope, the Turkish woman is visited by spectres,
which her mind, burrowing like "the demon
mole," sees struggling under the very grave she
watches.

The Turkish tradition runs thus and it is
best understood by remembering the papal
legends of purgatory, which are also of undoubted
pagan origin: The mullahs (priests) say that
when the dead Turk is laid in the grave, hooped
over loosely with boards, jammed in and embedded
lightly with the dry dusty earth of the
Scutari cypress grounds, as soon as his pale eyes
have struggled open and got accustomed to that
boiling darkness, an angel appears to him, and
bids him sit up to be examined as to his
faith; the dead man sits up, trembling; instantly
the two examining angels, black and livid
monsters, called Monker and Nakir, carrying huge
iron maces such as the pre-Adamite kings wielded,
or such as the Ginns war with, appear, the one