No European cares to linger about these precincts after dusk; here lie the
dead, in thick-strewn graves; here the jackal roams at night--it thrusts
its pointed snout through the ephemeral masonry of townsmen's tombs or
scratches downward within the ring of stones that mark some poor bedouin's
corpse, to take toll of the carrion horrors beneath; so you may find many
graves rifled. And if you come by day you will probably see, crouching
among the ruins, certain old men, pariahs, animated lumps of dirt and
rags. They are so uncouth and unclean, so utterly non-human, that one
wonders whether they are really of the sons of Adam, and not rather
goblins, or possibly some freak, some ill-natured jest on the part of the
vegetable or mineral kingdoms. Day after day they come and burrow for orts
among the dust-heaps, or brood motionless in the sunshine, or trace
cabalistic signs with their fingers in the sand--the future, they tell
you, can be unriddled out of its cascade-like movements.
It is one of the complaints of sentimentalists that the French are
abolishing these picturesque Arab cemeteries in Tunisia; combining
firmness with a great deal of tact, they insidiously appropriate these
sanctified premises and deck them with timber as a solace for coming
generations.
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