CATACOMBS AT PALERMO.

Auckland Star, Volume XXVII, Issue 7, 9 January 1886, Page 5

CATACOMBS AT PALERMO.

Grotesque and Horrible Scenes in a Burial Chamber.

The soil upon which the Capuchin Monaster at Palermo, Italy, is built, possesses to such a degree the singular property of hastening the decomposition of a corpse that in one year nothing remains upon the bones except a few patchas of black, withered skin, and perhaps some of the hair of the beard and cheeks. The coffins are placed in small lateral vaults, each of which contains about eight or ten dead; and after a year passes, the coffin is opened and the corpse is taken out, a frightful mummy, that is then suspenied in ono of the main galleries, where the members of the family come to visit it. Those who wish to be pre served by this drying process make their wills accordingly; and they will be filed away under those black vaults so long as their relatives pay a certain annual Stipend. When this is no longer paid, the remains are taken away and buried in the ordinary manner.

To enter, we pass through a chapel and slowly descend a broad stairway of stone. Before us is an immense gallery, to whose walls are suspended a whole nation of skeletons clad in the most oddly grotesque costumes. Some hang in the air side by side. A line of dead stands erect upon the ground. Some heads are gnawed by hideous vegetations, which deform even still more the jaws and the bones of the face ; some still preserve their hair, others fragments of moustache, others a long bit of beard.l

And they are all dressed, these dead— these wretched, hideous, and ridiculous dead—all dreased by their relatives, who have taken them out of their coffins in order to make them take part in this awful assembly. Almost all are clad in a sort of long black robe, witli a cowl which is generally drawn over the head. But there are others whose friends desire to attire more sumptuously, and the miserable skeletons wearing an embroidered Greek cap and enveloped in a rich man's dressing-gown, seems, as it lies upon its bnck, to sleep a nightmarish sleep —a sleep at once ludicrous and terrific. A placard like a blind man's begging card, bearing the name and the date of death, is hung to the neck of each corpse. Those dates make a cold shiver pass through the very marrow of one's bones.

Here are the women, even more burlesque than tho men, for they have been coquettiahly attired and bedecked. Their heads stare at you from within bonnets decorated with ribbons and with lace, making a snowwhite fringo around each black face, all petrified, all gnawed by the strange chemistry of the earth. Their hands protrude, like the severed roots of trees, from the sleeves of new dresses, and stockings that contain the bones of the legs look empty. Sometimes the dead wear only a pair of shoes too large for the poor dried up feet. But now we enter a gallery full of little glass coffins ; this is the ■ children's burial chamber. Tho bones of the little creatures, still soft, could not resist the woik of decomposition ; and you cannot tell exactly what you are looking at, the miserable little things are so deformed, so crushed, so frightfully shapeless; but tears come to your eyes when you observe that the mothers have dressed them all in the same little dresses they wore when alive, and they come here to look at them sometimes.

Often you see beside the corpse a phofo graph showing the living person as he was, and nothing is more startling and terrifying than this contrast.

We pass through another gallery, lower and darker, which seems to have been reserved for the poor. In one black recess there are some twenty of them suspended all together under an oponing in the roof, which lets in the outer air upon thorn in strong and sudden winds. They are clad in a sort of black canvas, fastened about the neck and feet, and as they lean one over the other you imagine they are shivering, seeking to escape, screaming for help. They look like the drowned crew of some ship. Here is the chamber of the priests—a vast gallory of horror ! At the first glance they seem more terriblo than tho others, robed in their sacred vestmentß black, red, and violet. But as you exainino them one after the other, a nervous and irreproseiblo laugh seizes you at tha spectacte of their bizarre attitudes, the ghastly comedy of their poses You behold some who ting; you sco otliors who pray. The faces if all have been lifted up ; the hands of all have been crossed. They wear the sacerdotal biretta upon thoir fleshiest! brows. Sometimes it hangs sideways over one ear in a jocular way; something it slips down over the no?o. A very carnival of death is this, made picturesque by the gilded richness of the ecclesiastical robes.

From time to time a hend rolls down upon the ground, the attachments of tho neck having been gnawed through by mice. Thousands of mice dwell in this human charnel-house.

On certain festival days the catacombs of the Capuchins are thrown opon ti the public. Once o drunken man got into tho place, lay down to ?lcoop and awoko in tho middle of tho night. He called, screamed, hosvled with terror, rnshed madly to and fro in vain offorts to escape, but no one heard him. In tho morning he was found clinging to to the iron bars of tho gate with so desperate a grip ihat it required a long time to detach his hands from them. He was mad.

Sinco that time a great bell has been suspended near the entrance.—"Paris Figaro."