First a group of blind men, at slow pace, chanting the first Surah of the Koran; then the biers, a melancholy line of them, covered with red and green cloths and borne head foremost; then schoolboys singing, in shrill voices, passages from a poem describing the last judgment; then companies of Fikees, reciting the profession of faith; then the female relatives of the dead, shrouded black forms with dishevelled hair, sitting in carriages or squatting on carts, wailing in their woe; and finally Ishmael Ameer himself and his vast and various following. Never had any one seen so great a concourse, not even on the days when the sacred carpet came from Mecca. There were men and women, rich and poor, great and small, religious fraternities with half-furled banners and dervishes with wrapped-up flags, sheikhs in robes and beggars in rags. Boys carried lamps, women carried candles, and young men carried torches and open flares which sent coils of smoke into the windless air. Their way lay down the broad boulevard of Mohammed Ali, across the wide square of the Bab-el-Khalk, past the Governorat and the police headquarters. As they walked at slow pace, they chanted the Surah which says, "O Allah! There is no strength nor power but in God! To God we belong and to Him we must return." The shops were shut, and the muezzins called from the minarets as the procession went by the mosques. Thus like a long, sinuous stream, sometimes flowing deep and still, sometimes rumbling in low tones, sometimes breaking into sharp sounds, they passed through the narrow streets of the city and out by the Bab-en-Nasr to the Mohammedan cemetery beyond the walls. As Hafiz approached this place the deep multitudinous hum of many tongues that came up from it was like the loud sighing of the wind. Calm as the night was, it was the same as if a storm had broken over that spot while the desert around lay sleeping under the unclouded moon. Through a thick haze that floated over the ground there were bubbles and flashes of light, the red and white flames of the lamps and torches, spurting and steaming like electrical apparitions from a cauldron. A cordon of mounted police surrounded the cemetery, and a few were riding inside. The funerals were over, and the people were squatting in groups on the bare sand. Hafiz could hear the solemn chanting of the Fikees as they passed their beads through their fingers and recited to the spirits of the dead. Some of the dervishes were dancing, and some of the women were swaying their bodies to a slow, monotonous, hypnotic movement that seemed to act on them like a drug.