Yet the ground is sprinkled with a few little flowers which, like those skulls, are known only to their Creator; their petals wear a pale smile and their fragrance is the fragrance of the tombs.

The grass and creepers fill up the corners or climb over the walls and niches to cover and beautify the naked ugliness and in places even penetrate into the fissures made by the earthquakes, so as to hide from sight the revered hollowness of the sepulcher.
At the time we enter, the people have driven the animals away, with the single exception of some old hog, an animal that is hard to convince, who shows his small eyes and pulling back his head from a great gap in the fence, sticks up his snout and seems to say to a woman praying near, "Don't eat it all, leave something for me, won't you ?" Two men are digging a grave near one of the tottering walls.

One of them, the grave-digger, works with indifference, throwing about bones as a gardener does stones and dry branches, while the other, more intent on his work, is perspiring, smoking, and spitting at every moment.
"Listen," says the latter in Tagalog, "wouldn't it be better for us to dig in some other place?
This is too recent." "One grave is as recent as another." "I can't stand it any longer! That bone you're just cut in two has blood oozing from it--and those hairs ?" "But how sensitive you are!" was the other's reproach.

"Just as if you were a town clerk! If, like myself, you had dug up a corpse of twenty days, on a dark and rainy night--! My lantern went out--" His companion shuddered.
"The coffin burst open, the corpse fell half-way out, it stunk--and supposing you had to carry it--the rain wet us both--" "Ugh! And why did you dig it up ?" The grave-digger looked at him in surprise.

"Why?
How do I know?
I was ordered to do so." "Who ordered you ?" The grave-digger stepped backward and looked his companion over from head to foot.