The Cities of the Dead

THE CITIES OF THE DEAD By Elizabeth Cannon Porter "It seemeth such a little way to me Across to that strange country, The Beyond. For it has grown to be The home of those of whom I am So fond. "And so for me there is no sting of Death, It is but crossing, with abated breath, A little strip of sea; To find one's loved ones waiting on the shore, More beautiful, more precious, than before." Memorial Day, May 30, which we devote to honoring the dead, was first started by a southern woman who generously decorated the graves of the Union soldiers as well as the Confederate resting places. In the great modern cemeteries all forms of mortuary may be obtained, to suit different nationalities! and sects. Usually they take the form of a fine park, interspersed with statuary. The markers, bearing the inscriptions, lie flat in the grass so they do not mar the effect of rolling lawn. Different sections are designated by such cognomens as "Slumberland," "Resthaven," "Victory," "Vale of Memory," "Borderland," "Graceland," "Sunrise Slope." "Babyland" is the last resting place of little children and is in the form of an im- mense mother heart. Baby forms of American sculptors, such as Edna Parsons and Jean Ingalls, are very popular. More pretentious figures are: "Mother Love," by Fanfani; "Merope," or the lost Pleiade, by the great Amer- ican sculptor, Randolph Rogers; Thorvaldsen's "Christ;" and Michael Angelo's "Moses." Most of the new cemeteries have a small church or chapel near the entrance gate for the conducting of simple funeral ceremonies, a "Church of the Angels," or a "Little Church of the Flowers." This, which is flower-clad, may seat a hundred people. The somberness of the edifice is mitigated by the holding also of marriage and christening services therein. The marble mausoleums, often of Italian architecture, are made as permanent as man's ingenuity can devise. Here there are family crypts, as well as single tombs. Alcoves and niches provide space for the placing of wreaths. Besides the walled-in apertures there are those more costly ones which may be pulled out like a drawer. Over these caskets are heavy plate glass so the mourners may look at the persons of their beloved. This is copied after the Sicilian form of burial. The most notable example of this in recent times is the casket of

586 IMPROVEMENT ERA the tenor Caruso. In a little cemetery above his beloved Naples, in Italy, visitors may look directly at the face of the former Metropolitan idol, through a sheet of plate glass. The figure is dressed in evening clothes and so expert is the embalming that he seems as handsome as he did in life. This* is perhaps as the great interpreter of human emotion in song would want it. Cremation is coming into more general use. The casket is wheeled out in all its funeral trappings. It is given over to the scientifically devised intense heat with the result that only the mineral substance of the body, the bones, are left; these are spread on a marble slab. A heavy roller is run over these, which literally leaves only a handful of ashes of the deceased. These are often left temporarily at the cemetery until the final disposal of them by relatives. If placed there permanently, they are put into graceful vases and set in a niche in a hall called the "Columbarium." If taken away, the ashes are usually enclosed in a metal box. Again they may be sealed in metal cylinders and sent by parcel post to relatives abroad. A man may provide in his will that his ashes be sprinkled in his garden or spread over his favorite rose bushes. He may direct that they be carried to a mountain peak. The most ultra-modern form is to have them scattered from an aeroplane. A picturesque scene was enacted when fellow aviators, in black-draped planes, carried the ashes of their former mates over the ocean and dropped them into the sea. It is said that the heads of an old Knickerbocker family, among the first to practice cremation in America, had their ashes placed in huge urns* to grace each side of the fireplace in their mansion up the Hudson. Cremation is practiced in India. The corpse is placed on a funeral pyre, and the closest male relative, after circling round it, applies the torch to the vicinity of the head. It used to be good form for the widow to throw herself alive on to her dead husband's flaming bier. The British, however, decreed that the wife could better express her devotion to her spouse by living, rather than dying, for him. In the city of Bombay, India, are the Parsees. These are fol- lowers of Zoroastor and exiles from Persia. They are rich, men of integrity, and noted for their benevolence of character, but they have, to us, a horrible way of disposing of their dead. They believe that not fire, water nor earth should be contaminated by a corpse, so they suspend dead bodies in their "Towers of Silence," about 25 feet in the air. Hovering vultures strip the bones of all flesh. After being thus exposed for about ten days, the remains are lowered into a pit. The most beautiful tomb in the world, the Taj Mahal, is at Agra, India. It was erected by Shah Jehan to his favorite Queen and it cost him his throne. The Empress followed him to the battle- field where her thirteenth child was born. As she lay dying he told

CITIES OF THE DEAD 587 TAJ MAHAL Tomb that the East Indian Emperor erected to his wife. It cost so much that he lost his throne as a result. The little Empress had followed him to the battle field. Her thirteenth child was born here and the mother died. her that he would erect a monument to their love. The white marble mausoleum is mirrored in blue lagoons*. Her sarcophagus rests in the middle of the rotunda, and by its side, his reposes. The cupolas of white marble are like soap bubbles. There is lacework wrought in stone. The Emperor ordered the marble flowers, lilies for her purity, the passion flower for their love, and the Egyptian lotus for peace in death. Twenty thousand artisans worked seventeen years on the edifice and the taxes became so intolerable that a revolution ensued. The tombs of the Pharaohs are wonderful. The Egyptians' were the master embalmers as well as the original concrete mixers. On reading of the magnificent putting away of that little-known Tut- ankh-amen, who has so constantly occupied the front pages of the newspapers three thousand years- after his demise, one is struck by the thought that some one must have loved the young monarch very dearly. Perhaps it was the mother whose gray hair was found in one of the first urns. A story, interesting if true, comes from Palestine that a kingly contemporary of King Solomon possessed the secret of a fluid which would preserve a body just as it was laid away. Thus could a woman,

588 IMPROVEMENT ERA in death, attain eternal beauty, safe from the ravages of decay. Sixteen of these stone sepulchres were stolen by vandals, who, fearing de- tection, drained off the liquid, whereat the bodies crumbled into nothingness. The human form of the Savior was conducted to a cave. The early Christians, persecuted and hunted down in Rome, held their meetings secretly in the Catacombs, the underground burial passages. It was here subsequently that Mark Twain woke up and exclaimed, on seeing himself surrounded by human bones: "Ho, 'tis the day of judgment and I'm the first one awake! America ahead again." Napoleon's tomb in the Hotel des Invalides, Paris, is the most visited spot in France. The casket of the little Emperor rests in a sarcophagus of red porphyry in a sunken space directly under the dome. Beautifully carved figuresi of women surround it. It is said that enough chips of red porphyry "from the tomb of Napoleon" have been sold to gullible tourists to have exhausted several quarries. At Vera Cruz, human bodies are interred in walls, perhaps be- cause of the dampness. For the same reason graves in New Orleans are literally "whited sepulchres" above ground. Some of the holiest and most illustrious dead are laid away under the stone floors of the churches of Mexico City. Here little black funeral cars are run on the electric railways. In some sections of some of the cemeteries of Mexico space is leased, not sold. If the lease is not renewed when the time expires, the bones are disinterred, thrown into a pile, and the ground leased again to another tenant. In the old cemeteries in the United States it was customary for the wealthier people to have a "vault," a brick or stone structure with an iron grating gate. Here the caskets of the deceased members of the family were laid, without being interred. One of the most beautiful examples of such a structure is the white marble one of the Stanford family at Palo Alto, California. It is located on the grounds of Stanford University. In it are the sarcophagi of the three mem- bers of the family: Mrs. Stanford in the middle, on one side of her, the Senator, on the other, her son — the boy who lost his life from fever in Italy. The setting of stories have been laid in sepulchres. Notably is the double suicide scene of Romeo and Juliet. If Juliet had possessed the "get-up" of a modern flapper she would have packed her grip and gone to her banished lover. Thus the whole beautiful tragedy would have been averted. Shakespeare's immortal story of frustrated young love would never have been written. Gray's Elegy, the most famous poem in the English language was inspired by and written in a country churchyard, Stoke Pogis, in Buckinghamshire. A more modern version is the experience of a girls' sorority which was holding its initiation exercises in a graveyard. A young man, trying to scare them, dressed himself in a sheet. Were they frightened by the ghost? They were not. The girls denuded him of his white wrappings, beat him, and tied him to a tombstone.

CITIES OF THE DEAD 589 Scenes and statuary from the ultra-modern Forest Lawn cemetery of Los Angeles. Owing to the wealth of floriculture, death is robbed of some of its gruesomeness. Sarcophagi here cost from $600, up. Flowers are placed in the niches of the mausoleum by the mourners. A queer example of Nemesis comes from France. A young girl who had been betrayed died without revealing the name of her traducer. The young man who had avoided her obsequies felt drawn to visit the new grave at night. Imagining he heard a noise, he turned to flee, but he felt something reach out and clutch him. To his guilty conscience it seemed that the girl's slim hand had reached out from the grave to hold him. They found him jabbering and quite mad on the outskirts of the cemetery the next morning. His trouser leg had caught in a gardener's trowel! The memory of those who have passed is kept alive by memorial buildings and monuments, stained glass windows, histories, book dedications, or by the simple tribute of flowers, but the dead live most in their descendants, the flesh and blood sons and daughters who carry on the line. What are wreathes of immortelles compared with chil- dren? The greatest monument that I know of is erected to a little woman who died a while ago in Salt Lake City. She had been the mother of fourteen children, also the foster mother of several orphaned brothers and sisters. At the time of her death she was over ninety, still capable and avid with life, and her lineal descendants at that time numbered 262 people!