“They are lively to-day,” he said, with an unearthly distortion of his features.
“The echoes?”
“C’est cela, citoyen. So men entitle them. No doubt it is human to think to put terror out of countenance by miscalling it.”
“How, then?”
He beckoned us to follow; plunged into the very funnel mouth that had vomited the eerie babble; led us swiftly by a winding passage, and stopped.
“Behold!” said he, flashing his torch to and fro over the surface of a roughly piled and cemented wall that seemed to close the entrance to a vast recess.
“Behold!” said he, sweeping the flame to the ground at the wall-foot.
We saw a skull or two; a few scattered bones. An indescribable brassy odour assailed our nostrils. The stones shone with an oily exudation.
“What company lies here, citizen?”
“A brave one, by my faith—a whole cemetery en bloc. Comment diable! shall they have fitted themselves each with his own by the day of Judgment! They pretend to sleep, piecemeal as they were bundled in; but utter so little as a whisper down there, and they will begin to stir and to talk. Then if thou shout’st, as I did—my God, what a clamour in reply! But one would have thought they had protested enough already.”