We entered the gloomy shadow of the vast cemetery, and found its cool and damp air a grateful exchange for the sunshine. The author of “Anastasius” gives a very graphic description of this place, throwing in some horrors, however, for which he is indebted to his admirable imagination. I never was in a more agreeable place for a summer-morning’s lounge, and, as I sat down on a turbaned headstone, near the tomb of Mohammed the Second’s horse, and indulged in a train of reflections arising from the superior distinction of the brute’s ashes over those of his master, I could remember no place, except Plato’s Academy at Athens, where I had mused so absolutely at my ease.
We strolled on. A slender and elegantly-carved slab, capped with a small turban, fretted and gilt, arrested my attention. “It is the tomb,” said my companion, “of one of the ichoglans or sultan’s pages. The peculiar turban is distinctive of his rank, and the inscription says, he died at eighteen, after having seen enough of the world! Similar sentiments are to be found on almost every stone. Close by stood the ambitious cenotaph of a former pacha of Widin, with a swollen turban, crossed with folds of gold, and a footstone painted and carved, only less gorgeously than the other; and under his name and titles was written, “I enjoyed not the world.” Farther on, we stopped at the black-banded turban of a cadi, and read again, underneath, “I took no pleasure in this evil world.” You would think the Turks a philosophising people, judging by these posthumous declarations; but one need not travel to learn that tombstones are sad liars.
The cemetery of Scutari covers as much ground as a city. Its black cypress pall spreads away over hill and dale, and terminates, at last, on a long point projecting into Marmora, as if it would pour into the sea the dead it could no longer cover. From the Armenian village, immediately above, it forms a dark, and not unpicturesque foreground to a brilliant picture of the gulf of Nicomedia and the clustering Princes’ Islands. With the economy of room which the Turks practise in their burying-grounds, laying the dead, literally, side by side, and the immense extent of this forest of cypresses, it is probable that on no one spot on the earth are so many of the human race gathered together.