Our party started one morning,on donkeys, as usual, for my foot was not yet strong,along the Darb al-Janazah round the Southern wall of the town. The locomotion was decidedly slow, principally in consequence of the tent-ropes which the Hajis had pinned down literally all over the plain, and falls were by no means unfrequent. At last we arrived at the end of the Darb, where I committed myself by mistaking the decaying place of those miserable schismatics the Nakhawilah[FN#7] for Al-Bakia, the glorious cemetery of the Saints. Hamid corrected my blunder with tartness, to which I replied as tartly, that in our countryAfghanistanwe burned the body of every heretic upon whom we could lay our hands. This truly Islamitic custom was heard with general applause, and as the little dispute ended, we stood at the open gate of Al-Bakia. Then having dismounted I sat down on a low Dakkah or stone bench within the walls, to obtain a general view and to prepare for the most fatiguing of the Visitations.
There is a tradition that seventy thousand, or according to others a hundred thousand saints, all with faces like full moons, shall cleave on the last day the yawning bosom
[p.32] of Al-Bakia.[FN#8] About ten thousand of the Ashab (Companions of the Prophet) and innumerable Sadat are here buried: their graves are forgotten, because, in the olden time, tombstones were not placed over the last resting-places of mankind. The first of flesh who shall arise is Mohammed, the second Abu Bakr, the third Omar, then the people of Al-Bakia (amongst whom is Osman, the fourth Caliph), and then the incol[ae] of the Jannat al-Maala, the Meccan cemetery. The Hadis, whoever dies at the two Harims shall rise with the Sure on the Day of judgment, has made these spots priceless in value. And even upon earth they might be made a mine of wealth. Like the catacombs at Rome, Al-Bakia is literally full of the odour of sanctity, and a single item of the great aggregate here would render any other Moslem town famous. It is a pity that this people refuses to exhume its relics.
The first person buried in Al-Bakia was Osman bin Mazun, the first of the Muhajirs, who died at Al-Madinah. In the month of Shaaban, A.H. 3, the Prophet kissed the forehead of the corpse and ordered it to be interred within sight of his abode.[FN#9] In those days the field was covered with the tree Gharkad; the vegetation was cut down, the ground was levelled, and Osman was placed in the centre of the new cemetery. With his own hands Mohammed planted two large upright stones at the head and the feet of his faithful follower[FN#10]; and in process of time a dome covered the spot. Ibrahim, the Prophets infant second