In Proportion As Their Notions Of Paradise Are Coarse And
Material, The Appearance Of Their Cemeteries Is Poetical, Especially
In India.
One may pleasantly spend whole hours in these shady,
delightful gardens, amongst their white monuments crowned with
turbans, covered with roses and jessamine and sheltered with rows
of cypresses.
We often stopped in such places to sleep and dine.
A cemetery near Thalner is especially attractive. Out of several
mausoleums in a good state of preservation the most magnificent
is the monument of the family of Kiladar, who was hanged on the
city tower by the order of General Hislop in 1818. Four other
mausoleums attracted our attention and we learned that one of them
is celebrated throughout India. It is a white marble octagon,
covered from top to bottom with carving, the like of which could
not be found even in Pere La Chaise. A Persian inscription on its
base records that it cost one hundred thousand rupees.
By day, bathed in the hot rays of the sun, its tall minaret-like
outline looks like a block of ice against the blue sky. By night,
with the aid of the intense, phosphorescent moonlight proper to
India, it is still more dazzling and poetical. The summit looks
as if it were covered with freshly fallen snow-crystals. Raising
its slender profile above the dark background of bushes, it suggests
some pure midnight apparition, soaring over this silent abode of
destruction and lamenting what will never return. Side by side
with these cemeteries rise the Hindu ghats, generally by the river
bank.
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