There Were No Outward Signs
Of Despair Nor Of Violent Terror, But Many Of The Voices That Had
Swelled The
Busy hum of men were already hushed in death, and the
survivors, so used to scream and screech in their
Earnestness
whenever they bought or sold, now showed an unwonted indifference
about the affairs of this world: it was less worth while for men
to haggle and haggle, and crack the sky with noisy bargains, when
the great commander was there, who could "pay all their debts with
the roll of his drum."
At this time I was informed that of twenty-five thousand people at
Alexandria, twelve thousand had died already; the destroyer had
come rather later to Cairo, but there was nothing of weariness in
his strides. The deaths came faster than ever they befell in the
plague of London; but the calmness of Orientals under such
visitations, and the habit of using biers for interment, instead of
burying coffins along with the bodies, rendered it practicable to
dispose of the dead in the usual way, without shocking the people
by any unaccustomed spectacle of horror. There was no tumbling of
bodies into carts, as in the plague of Florence and the plague of
London. Every man, according to his station, was properly buried,
and that in the usual way, except that he went to his grave in a
more hurried pace than might have been adopted under ordinary
circumstances.
The funerals which poured through the streets were not the only
public evidence of deaths.
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