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Laborde, one of the conspirators, came to inform me that another great kabar was to be held in the court, and that we were summoned to be present. "We went, and found upwards of a hundred persons, judges and nobles and officers, seated in a large semi-circle upon chairs and benches, and some upon the ground. Behind them was drawn up a detachment of soldiers.
She writes: "To-day was held in the Queen's palace a great kabar, which lasted six hours and was very stormy. The kabar concerned us Europeans, and met to decide our fate.
"This morning I was seated at my desk. I had just laid aside my pen, and was meditating whether, after the last kabar, the Queen would not have come to a decision. All at once I heard an extraordinary noise in the court. I was about to leave my room, the windows of which looked in an opposite direction, to see what was the matter, when Mons.
The missionaries had not climbed so high, nor so far, this side the river. They scrambled slowly down, one after the other, descending many hundreds upon hundreds of feet; then filed slantwise over the slopes, right into the rocky Mussulman cemetery, across that, and thence into the city by the Báb-el-M`kabar.
With the hookah gurgling softly at his feet, Mohammed leaned back his head and gazed in silent appreciation at the wonders of the heavens. There was Turka Kabar, the crocodile; and Menish el Tabir, the sleeping beauty; and Rook Hamana, the leopard, and there up there to the far north was a shooting star. How gracefully it shot across the sky, leaving its wake of yellow light behind it!
In this hothouse of sickly odours these women lived together, having no occupation but that of eating and drinking and sleeping, no education but devising new means of pleasing the lust of their husband's eye, no delight than that of supplanting one another in his love, no passion but jealousy, no diversion but sporting on the roofs, no end but death and the Kabar.
They have none of them packs or saddles, unless their sore backs are too deeply aggravated to allow of exposure to the flies and dust; and in due time, one by one, the old or the dying drop tacitly out of the ranks; a couple of days the scavenging dogs' work is done and only a tangled knot of bones is kicked away from the roadside by the feet of the living generation, which have picked up the scantiest feed, and are straying back citywards again in the late afternoon, to be called for outside the Báb-el-M`kabar each by its owner.
And then once through the Báb-el-M`kabar, the great company in white turn into the Moorish burial-ground, and arrange themselves in a long line against the hillside, and the chant becomes general, almost a great cry, full of the strange fascination of certain Eastern music, withal so unintelligible to Europeans. The body, loosely wrapped in white, lies on an open bier.
El doollah had not started; and leaving them all in the road below us, we passed the little knots of countrywomen who sit by the Báb-el-M`kabar selling myrtle for laying upon the graves, and wound our way uphill through the old Mussulman cemetery, with its quaint domed tombs and toothed, arched doorways, cracked, decayed, and yellow with lichen, half hidden among the tangle of bushes and wild flowers on the rough slope.
Often, on his nightly rambles, he heard himself reviled, and saw the very children of the streets spit over their fingers at the mention of his name. And sometimes as he passed he heard blind people whisper together and say, "He is a saint. He comes from the Kabar at nightfall. Allah sends him to help poor men who have been in the clutches of Israel the Jew." Nevertheless, Israel kept his secret.
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