If, however, such elements have entered into earlier thoughts of death, it is to be feared that Palestine of the present day has little of them left. The great light of Christ illuminated the sepulchres of Christian Syria; but with the Mohammedan conquest darkness fell again, and all the morbid fascination of the grave reasserted itself. There is little reverence for the ordinary man’s place of burial now, whether it be of ancient or of recent date. Dr. Merrill tells how he has found Arabs actually stealing graves, i.e. clearing out old ones to make room for a newly-deceased body, on the plea that “the dead man who was buried there could not possibly want his grave any longer.”[45] On many a hillside the rock tombs are rent and split, like pictures from Dante’s _Inferno_, where they have been blasted open with gunpowder in the search for treasure; and sometimes parties of natives may be seen prowling about a hillside on that business. The find may consist of glass bracelets, which have to be taken from the bone of a baby’s arm, or gold earrings beside the skull whose face was once fair; but they excite no emotion except that of money values. Laurence Oliphant had difficulty in restraining the natives who searched with him from smashing the cinerary urns they found, on [Illustration: JERUSALEM--EXTERIOR OF THE GOLDEN, OR BEAUTIFUL, GATE. This gate, which was walled up by the Arabs after the conquest of Jerusalem, forms a tower projecting from the Eastern Wall of the Temple Area. The tombs in the foreground are part of the great Mohammedan Cemetery extending along the Eastern Wall of Jerusalem.] the plea that “they are so very old that they are not worth anything.” With the decay of reverence for the dead, however, there seems to have been a recrudescence of that morbid and charnel-house interest in death which marks the spirit of the land. At times one is shocked by the apparently total indifference displayed--houses being built close to the mouths of graves or even, it is said, upon the roofs of them. Yet any one who has seen a festival at a holy tomb, whether Jewish or Mohammedan, must have realised the strong attraction by which death and the grave draw men. A curious instance of this is that of the “Jews’ Burning” at Tiberias.