GENERAL.

Thames Star, Volume XLVII, Issue 14554, 23 June 1913, Page 6

GENERAL.

CAST OF A DEATH STRUGGLE.

OBTAINED BT PLACING A MARTYR IN A; MASB OF SOFT

CONCRBTB.

In the museum of Algiers there is one object which is unique in the world's list of curiosities. It is a plaster cast of the martyr Geronimo in the agony of death. The Algerians put Geronimo alive into a soft mass of concrete, which presently hardened into a block and was built into a fort.

This was in 1569, and about forty years later a Spanish writer described the event and told exactly how that particular block could be located. The fort stood for nearly three hundred years. Then' in 1863 it was torn down, the block was identified and broken open, and an almost perfect mould of the de*d martyr was fotuwl within. They filled the mould with plaster, and 'the result, a Wonderful cast, lies there in the museum to-day, face do*n as he died, hands and feet bound and straining head twisted to one side in the supreme torture of that terrible martyrdom.

"It is a gruesome, fascinating thing," writes Albert Bigelow Paine in "Outing," "and you go back to look at it more than once, and you slip out between times for a breath of fresh air. If I lived in Algiers and at any time should sprout a little bud of discontent with the present state, of affairs—a little sympathy with the population—l would go and take a look at Geronimo, and forthwith all the discontent and the, sympathy would pass away, and I would come out gloating in the fact that France can crack the whip, and that we of the West can ride them down."