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When a Jew was buried in Tetuan, the uncoffined body, wrapped in sheets on a wooden bier, might only be borne out of the city by the Báb-el-Je'f, literally the Gate of the Unclean Dead that is, the Jews' Gate. The mourners howled and the male relatives cried aloud; friends followed, talking and smoking cigarettes.
At least many had been granted the right of sepulture there, but in a number of cases the hasty manner in which their corpses had received burial was all too noticeable, and a stranger visiting the churchyard confines years after the combat could not fail to be struck by the many uncoffined human relics which met his gaze.
The man who had died to save Rachel he could not bury uncoffined in a grave of sand, where the natural processes of dissolution would destroy him utterly. His and Rachel's debts to Atsu were great, and the demand was made upon him now to discharge all that was possible in the one act of caring for the dead soldier's remains.
"'In a moment, like a drop of rain, He sinks into its depths with bubbling groan, Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown. "This part of the ceremony is rather less impressive than the correspondent part on land; but still there is something solemn, as well as startling, in the sudden splash, followed by the sound of the grating, as it is towed along under the main-chains.
The word was passed, and we were soon under weigh, four negroes leading the van, carrying the uncoffined body of the poor girl on a sofa; while two servants, with large splinters of a sort of resinous wood for flambeaux, walked by the side of it.
And still the 'finds' continued, at the average rate of seventy a day. The once beautiful driving beach was strewn with mounds and trenches, holding unrecognized and uncoffined victims of the flood; and between this improvised cemetery and a ridge of débris, three miles long and in places higher than the houses had been, a line of cremation fires poisoned the air.
Eleven of these victims were afterward deposited, uncoffined, in unconsecrated ground; the other seven were left unburied to moulder on the gibbet. On the 2d June, Villars, the leader in the Daalem rising, suffered on the scaffold, with three others. On the 3d, Counts Egmont and Horn were brought in a carriage from Ghent to Brussels, guarded by ten companies of infantry and one of cavalry.
Dolores flung herself down on the bed, patting the dead face with nervous fingers; but she was dry-eyed, no filial despair raised tumult in her breast, her pleading was for the impossible for the dead lips to speak and when she was refused her plea, she sprang from the couch in a paroxysm of royal fury: "Now, by the powers of evil, he shall lie uncoffined until those secretive lips read me the riddle they have half told!" she cried, pacing between bed and wall with uplifted arms and hard, glittering eyes.
But no pen has recorded the numbers of the forlorn and starving who perished by the wayside or in the ditches, or of the mournful groups, sometimes of whole families, who lay down and died, one after another, upon the floor of their miserable cabins, and so remained uncoffined and unburied, till chance unveiled the appalling scene.
But the spirit of the little bride flew to the side of her uncoffined body to protect it from desecration ere her lord had looked upon it. And there she saw the little brother playing by the dead. And as she came he turned and ran down the mountain, for he had heard the voice of Black Roderick calling; so the spirit of the little bride knew her task was done.
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