During all this time the power of the plague was rapidly increasing.  When I first arrived, it was said that the daily number of “accidents” by plague, out of a population of about two hundred thousand, did not exceed four or five hundred, but before I went away the deaths were reckoned at twelve hundred a day.  I had no means of knowing whether the numbers (given out, as I believe they were, by officials) were at all correct, but I could not help knowing that from day to day the number of the dead was increasing.  My quarters were in a street which was one of the chief thoroughfares of the city.  The funerals in Cairo take place between daybreak and noon, and as I was generally in my rooms during this part of the day, I could form some opinion as to the briskness of the plague.  I don’t mean this for a sly insinuation that I got up every morning with the sun.  It was not so; but the funerals of most people in decent circumstances at Cairo are attended by singers and howlers, and the performances of these people woke me in the early morning, and prevented me from remaining in ignorance of what was going on in the street below.

These funerals were very simply conducted.  The bier was a shallow wooden tray, carried upon a light and weak wooden frame.  The tray had, in general, no lid, but the body was more or less hidden from view by a shawl or scarf.  The whole was borne upon the shoulders of men, who contrived to cut along with their burthen at a great pace.  Two or three singers generally preceded the bier; the howlers (who are paid for their vocal labours) followed after, and last of all came such of the dead man’s friends and relations as could keep up with such a rapid procession; these, especially the women, would get terribly blown, and would straggle back into the rear; many were fairly “beaten off.”  I never observed any appearance of mourning in the mourners:  the pace was too severe for any solemn affectation of grief.

When first I arrived at Cairo the funerals that daily passed under my windows were many, but still there were frequent and long intervals without a single howl.  Every day, however (except one, when I fancied that I observed a diminution of funerals), these intervals became less frequent and shorter, and at last, the passing of the howlers from morn till noon was almost incessant.  I believe that about one-half of the whole people was carried off by this visitation.  The Orientals, however, have more quiet fortitude than Europeans under afflictions of this sort, and they never allow the plague to interfere with their religious usages.  I rode one day round the great burial-ground.  The tombs are strewed over a great expanse, among the vast mountains of rubbish (the accumulations of many centuries) which surround the city.  The ground, unlike the Turkish “cities of the dead,” which are made so beautiful by their dark cypresses, has nothing to sweeten melancholy, nothing to mitigate the odiousness of death.