MAHOMEDAN TOMBS. 
187 
ness, walking at sunset among the tombs, meditating 
upon perhaps their own end in the silence and solem- 
nity around them. I could not deny myself also the 
melancholy pleasure of wandering in this “ place of 
graves/’ The sun had just sunk behind the horizon, 
and darkness was* rapidly casting her shadows alike 
over the splendid works of human ingenuity, and 
those of a higher artificer. The fox-bat bustled from 
his covert among the tombs, and, spreading his broad 
leathern wings upon the still calm air, disturbed the 
holy silence by the flutter of his featherless pinions 
as he sailed heavily along through the gathering gloom. 
The freshness of the evening was grateful after the 
action of a burning sun, and the perfect stillness 
around gave a tone to my reflections which was new 
to me, and which I was therefore glad to indulge. 
The Moslems left the cemetery as soon as the sun 
disappeared, so that I was^ left alone and in darkness. 
The shrill laugh-shriek of the jackal occasionally in- 
terrupted the silence only to make it the more solemn 
from the intense hush by which that nightly din was 
succeeded. I could not help reflecting with the poet 
that — 
“ The very earth on which I trod once lived,” 
and was nothing the worse for the reflection. 
The military station at Cawnpoor extends several 
miles along the banks of the Ganges. Not far off are 
the ruins of a small pagoda, on the site of an an- 
cient city, Kanouge, now “ with the things beyond 
* In the warmer latitudes there is scarcely any twilight, but 
darkness almost immediately succeeds the sun-set. 
