Uskub is ordinarily a quiet and sober town, and well might it be; it is nestled in a valley of death. Tombstones are always the prominent feature of a Turkish town, but Uskub resembles an oasis in a desert of dead. Acres of them in general disorder, a few erect but mostly toppling or fallen, surround the town and stretch long arms into it; they flank the main road and dot the side streets, and far out into the country lone deserted stones stand where no man’s hand has been for ages. The sight is gruesome, and one’s mind is wont to picture the many massacres that have made this sea of silent slabs. But a large proportion of the graves are those of Mohamedans, and history records no general slaughter of them since the battle of Kossovo, more than four centuries agone. This is the explanation--Christians plant bones on top of bones, but the six feet of earth allotted to the dead Turk generally remains his until Judgment Day. In many Turkish towns you will find streets turned out of their natural course to leave the grave of a Turk undisturbed. [Illustration: GRAVES OF DEAD COMMITTAJIS.] [Illustration: THE OLD TURKISH SEXTON WHO LIVED IN A GRAVE.] The old sexton of a cemetery in Uskub, who lives in a cave burrowed under the ground like the abodes of those he watches, was in a terrible dilemma after the American adventuress had snapped his photograph, because she, a giaour, tramped back to the road over the resting-place of believers. On one side of the Hôtel Turati is a Turkish cemetery, and not far behind it is a Christian burial-ground; and almost daily a funeral procession passes the hotel to one or the other of these burial-grounds. The body of a Turk is borne on a litter on the shoulders of his friends, each of them taking a turn for a few minutes as pall-bearer. If the deceased was very popular, and the distance from his home to the grave very short, there is a continual commotion about the corpse, friends giving place rapidly to one another as the body is borne along. The Christians do not carry their dead on their shoulders, but they, also, convey the corpse on a litter to lower it into a wooden coffin in the grave. Priests precede the funeral parade on foot in full vestments, chanting as they march, and the friends follow the body, one carrying the coffin-lid. A strange sacrifice for the dead takes place quarterly in the Christian cemetery. The peasants gather from far and near bringing cakes and pans of boiled wheat, of the best they can afford, and place them on the graves of the dead. Candles are stuck about the food and tinsel paper cut in fine shreds arranged over it. Priests pass from grave to grave praying with the peasants for the souls of the departed, and sons of the priests, who serve as acolytes, swing censers. At the conclusion of the ceremony the sacrificial food is distributed to the poor--or rather the poorer--and lazy gypsies gather with many naked babies at the borders of the cemetery.