The Big Read: O grave, where is thy victory?

This week archaeologists discovered the coffin of Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, which is great news for those who knew it was missing.

When Cervantes died on April 23 1616 he was buried in the Madrid convent of the religious order that some years earlier had negotiated his release from Algerian pirates. But religious orders have their strong and weak points: the Trinitarias clergy were top-notch hostage negotiators but let themselves down in the coffin-whereabouts management department. Somehow they managed to lose him.

Obviously this was embarrassing to the Spanish - William Shakespeare also died on April 23 1616, and the English know where he is - so they've been diligently searching for several years using ground-penetrating radar, pausing only for occasional debt crises and long siestas. This week, with a tired, relieved olé, they found a coffin engraved with his initials.

I'm pleased for them, but some part of me does suspect that graves are more interesting when they're missing. The burial place of Alexander the Great has never been found - we know only that he was embalmed in rags and honey and lay for at least 400 years beneath the city of Alexandria. There are legends that he might have been moved to St Mark's in Venice, but more likely he's still down there somewhere, preserved in sweet amber and shadowy greatness while the city he built bustles, breaks and redoubles above him.

When Genghis Khan died on campaign in China he was buried in an unmarked place, a river was diverted to cover his grave and all witnesses were killed to prevent them talking. Sir Francis Drake was buried at sea in full armour in a lead-lined coffin and people have been hunting for it in the shallow waters off Panama for the last 30 years.

A missing grave has a shroud of romance because it tells a story that hasn't ended. Graves themselves are disquietingly prosaic. They're like the old temples in Egypt: you visit hoping for some presence of the past but the past is never there. I often feel obliged to seek out the graves of people that have meant something to me - Edith Piaf and Oscar Wilde in Père Lachaise, Ernest Shackleton on South Georgia island, the fallen Emperor Napoleon on St Helena and in Les Invalides - and I always leave wondering if the fault is in me for being insufficiently sensitive. The place is just a place; it can't bear the weight of meaning I project on it. There's always dissatisfaction and anti-climax, a slight feeling of foolishness. What am I doing here? Why go on pilgrimage to the one place I can be sure this person didn't visit when they were alive? Dead people that matter always feel least present in the place where they lie.

Personally I dislike the thought of being in a graveyard - I'm afraid of any party that I can't leave when I want to - but there is one grave in the world that pleases me. The Victorian explorer Richard Burton led the first expedition into Africa to confirm the source of the Nile. He didn't quite succeed - he thought it was Lake Tanganyika - but he went on to a life of adventure and passionate scholarship. He spoke 29 languages and went on hajj to Mecca disguised as an Iranian merchant; he wrote 50 books and was the first to translate the Kama Sutra and the Arabian Nights and TheLuciad of Camoens into English; he went to the highlands of Ethiopia and the jungles of Brazil and the deserts of Syria.

It was all possible only because of the beauty of his marriage to Isabel Arundel. They travelled together and nursed each other's illnesses. They edited each other's books and fought each other's battles and encouraged each other through setback and failure. They were a forthright partnership when that is not what marriages were. Shortly before he died in Trieste, Isabel asked Richard how he would like to be buried. He said at sea. She replied she couldn't bring herself to do that, that she needed a place to visit him. "I would like," he said gently, "to take a long sleep beside you in a tent."

When he died she commissioned a tomb made from dark Forest of Dean stone and white Carrara marble. It was modelled to reproduce the tent he had designed for their use in Syria, one tall enough to allow them both to stand inside. Today in a Mortlake cemetery you can walk through the unremarkable English graveyard with its grey, damp, unremarkable headstones and encounter a bright, dry corner of Bedouin desert. You can peer through a stained glass window and see Richard Burton and Isabel Arundel lying side by side, gently washed in filtered sunlight, with camel bells strewn beside them.