Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 243, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 October 1918 — LONG HOLY PLACES [ARTICLE]

LONG HOLY PLACES

Shrines That Are Held in Verier* ation by Moslems. AN True Follower* of Mahomet Eager That Their Last Resting Plaeo Shall Be Near Tho*e of Their Great Apostle*. Near to the resting place of the first , great apostles of their faith It is the dearest wish of all pious Mohammedans to lie after death. The shrines of Najaf, Kerbela and Kazimain, the restlug places of All. Hussein, and the seventh and ninth Imams, lie on the edge of the desert in the country British troops now occupy in Mesopotamia. One often meets a corpse on the road packed in a long crate or bundle of palm leaves and slung across the back of an ass, says Edmund Chandler, the press representative in the Mesopotamian forces. The pilgrim behind is taking his relative to swell the population of the cities of the dead by which these sanctuaries qre surrounded. Of the three shrines, Najaf Is the richest, and to some minds the most sacred. Like Kazimain, it is approached by a horse car line. The cars are not of the pattern of those that ply in European cities. I believe the few British soldiers who have seen them rank them with the Clock tower in the mosque as first among the lions of Mesopotamia. > In peace time the dead come from a wide radius. The donkey with the bundle like a big carpet bag on its back, draped in wattle or nch silk, according to the means of the pilgrim, may have come all the way from Bokhara. A few years ago a corpse arrived from the Persian embassy at Paris.

The rich as a rule are buried in the shrine itself. The fee for interment in the mosque is $250. For burial outside the walls of the city the pilgrim pays anything from four to ten rupee (two to five dollars), according to the distance he has come. Many pilgrims buy houses in Najaf, and thus the place is gradually becoming a city of the dead. Nine houses out of ten have graves in them. Sometimes the building is nothing else than a tomb. Najaf has proved impregnable to Wahhabi and Bedouin. It is believed to be fabulously rich. There are two stores of treasure. The old treasury has not been opened since the visit of Shar Nasir-ud-Dln, 50 years ago. It is buried In a vault and built over with brick and lime, with no door or key or window by way of entrance. The new treasure is In the keeping of the kiliddar—gold and silver, and jewels, and precious stones, silks, and shawls, and pearled curtains. One of the first giffe for the shrines to reach Bagdad, after our troops entered the city were four curved swords of gpld, with diamonds on the sheath and hilt They had been dispatched from Constantinople to Bagdad when the British menace was regarded as a madman's df earn, and bore the inscription, “From the servant of all pious Moslems, Enver Bey.” No doubt they were intended to symbolize the might whereby the Turks would defend the city against their hated foes, the Christians;