A man acting as a tourist guide ran his finger along beautiful calligraphy written in white marble letters on a ground of verde antique. ‘The first Surah of the Kuran,’ Shelmerdine whispered at my enquiry. ‘By the calligrapher Yayha Sufi.’
Keeping his voice low Shelmerdine explained the burial ritual. The deceased Mehmed’s body was first being washed with scented water at the family home, the ears, nose and mouth stopped with cotton wool.
‘It won’t be long now,’ he assured us.
Headstones leaned in attitudes of gentle abandon, some with replicas of turbans, like old men reflecting. Cemeteries are repositories of stories, remembrances of human beings who have done their time on earth and gone on to the Great Beyond. One headstone inscribed with intricate Ta’lik calligraphy caught my eye. I passed my binoculars and note-book to our interpreter and asked him to translate it. Rather than a Koranic quotation, it was a poem:
‘Well did he know the end of this life, for he had been familiar with its beauties; thinking his appointed time yet another gazelle-eyed one, he said “My dark-eyed love” and followed it.’
The combination of hot sun and cemetery took my thoughts back to my military days. Cemeteries in India kept half-a-dozen outlying graves permanently open for contingencies and incidental wear and tear. In the Hills many of these pre-prepared graves were pathetically small, readied for European children arriving weakened from the Plains who succumbed to the effects of the Rains or from pneumonia attributed to ayahs taking them through damp pine-woods after sunset.
Twenty minutes passed. A strikingly handsome wood-pigeon walked busily and bulkily about the sparse grass, its nocturnal home a nearby cherry-tree grown from a mourner’s discarded stone. I reached for a handkerchief. Offensive smells from decaying newly-buried corpses were now overpowering the scent from evaporating tree resins.
The sun rose higher in the sky. Swaddled as we were, the temperature was becoming intense.
‘They should be here any minute,’ Shelmerdine repeated reassuringly.
To pass the time Holmes questioned our guide on the tradition surrounding the Sword of Osman.
‘The ceremonial girding of the scimitar takes place between five and fifteen days after a Sultan’s accession,’ came the explanation. ‘After that the Sword returns to its resting place and remains under constant guard until the next Sultan is enthroned.’
‘Who has the right to approach it?’ my companion enquired.
‘The Sharif of Konya perhaps. The Sultan of course. And the Chief Armourer to check the blade’s condition. No-one else.’
‘No-one at all?’ I persisted.
‘No-one,’ the dragoman replied.
‘Not even the Sultan’s wives?’ I heard Holmes ask.
‘Certainly no woman, however high her rank.’
Just when I wondered if the dragoman had got his cemeteries wrong, a turban hove into sight over the gradient. I pointed it out to Holmes with a surreptitious motion of my handkerchief. The turban rose higher and higher until it was in full view, resting on a body wrapped in a white cloth. The bier supporting the corpse became visible, then the men carrying it. Onlookers seemingly going about their day sprang to the alert, jumping in with offers to support the burden on the final steps to the mosque. I brought the binoculars to bear, hiding them under my capacious hood to reduce the reflection. A short yataghan lay by the turban, sinuous as a swallow’s wing. The procession passed along a seated line of scribes clutching pen sharpeners and paper scissors and entered the mosque courtyard. The pall bearers lowered the bier on to a stone while a group of men at a chosen spot among the tombs began digging at the hard ground.
‘It’s our man,’ Shelmerdine muttered in reply to my questing look. ‘Hence the weapon on his chest.’
In a muted voice our guide described the funeral ritual.
‘When the corpse has been submitted to the soil and the last footsteps of the burial party die away, two Examining Angels from heaven named Munkar and Nekir appear at the sepulchre to interrogate the deceased’s soul. They ask three questions: “Who is your God?” “Who is your Prophet?” and “What is your religion?”.’
The pit ready, the torso arrayed in a white shroud was lowered into it and turned on its right side to face Mecca. The Imam leant down near the dead man and whispered in his ear the precise replies the deceased should give to the terrible Angels. The mourners threw a few handfuls of soil on the corpse and a large flat stone was lowered over it. A cavity had been carved into the stone, designed to accumulate water for thirsty birds or small animals.
The bearers and mourners dispersed. The three of us were completely alone in the vast burial area. A shudder ran through me, unsettled by the thought of the Examining Angels Munkar and Nekir.
Shelmerdine and I looked at Holmes.
‘What now?’ I asked.
‘We wait,’ Holmes replied. ‘We may expect the dead man’s widow here soon. At the very least she’ll want to pray for her husband’s soul near his corpse, even at the risk of being captured.’
In the silence peculiar to places inhabited only by the souls of the Dead, I ruminated on my own epitaph. A day or two before the Battle of Maiwand I’d put my papers in order and checked my Last Will and Testament - a small sum to my elder brother, the rest to my regiment. With the pomposity of youth I arranged with the regimental masons for the Urdu words Sarvatra Izzat O Iqbal - ‘Everywhere with Honour and Glory’ - to be carved into my headstone. In the event a wound from a flintlock bullet followed by enteric fever at Peshawar would hardly qualify as glorious considering we gave out the base hospital address as ‘Café Enterique, Boulevard des Microbes’ - and we lost the battle against Ayub Khan’s forces. Neither the wound nor the fever did for me.
The words painted on my battered old tin dispatch box - ‘John H. Watson, M.D. Late Indian Army’ - would be a less over-ripe epitaph, though my attachment to the Berkshires did not strictly constitute the Indian Army. Perhaps I would copy the Spartans -
WATSON
In War
I pondered how my life, like most people’s, had seemed led more by kismet than my own will. Perhaps more apt would be ‘I only thought to make, I knew not what’ . What I would want buried with me was easier - my watch, whistle, knife, helmet and field-glasses and a memento of my wife Mary’s love. And puttees. And possibly one of Holmes’s briar pipes for sentiment’s sake.
‘So what will it be?’ Holmes asked me.
‘What will what be?’ I exclaimed, jolting back to the present.
‘The wording of your epitaph?’
‘Why, Holmes...’
His hand came up sharply to silence me. He inclined his head in the direction of a stand of cypresses. Precisely as he predicted, a woman had seated herself there, shaded from the harsh sun. She stared in the direction of the newly-dug grave, tears coursing down her cheeks. It could only be our quarry, Mehmed’s widow.
Silently the three of us approached her, expressions intent, garbed like a marauding band of Grim Reapers or the Brethren of the Misericordia. She struggled to her feet, staring at us in abject fear as we herded her deeper into the grove for privacy. She mouthed words in Ottoman Turkish which I took to be begging for mercy or a protest of innocence.
Holmes drew back the heavy hood from his face.
‘Tell her we’re not here to do her harm. We come as intermediaries. We believe we can help her.’
Shelmerdine translated Holmes’s words. My comrade’s blue eyes showed he was a Ferenghi, a foreigner. The petrified woman’s gaze switched to us, half-frightened, half-hopeful.