Yet, indeed, the scene was a very awful one. Near the whole of the further side of the crypt had collapsed, making of the place a huge cave-like mouth stuck with blackened splinters of teeth, and gorged to the throttle with a litter of human remains. They lay scattered all over the vast jaw of it—chewed, dismembered, scarce one to be identified in its entirety. Here it might be a red-capped skull, with a naked brown cutlass tilted across its teeth; here a limbless body, horribly suggestive in its crumbling stumps of a mangled doll dribbling sawdust; here something, whole but for its head, crooking its fingers into the dusty scalp of a comrade from whom the legs had been torn. They may have counted to near a dozen in all, if one had had the stomach to tally the flannel caps and brass-buttoned jackets and disjointed slops. But, ten or twenty, the moral was the same. Here at the crook of a finger was the whole life of the hill blown into fragments; and the legend of the earthquake laid.
I understood that plain enough before Harry’s low excited voice sounded over my shoulder.
“Come away, Dick! Look there; don’t you see how it happened?”
He drew me back and we stood, figures of tragedy, flashing the light from our candle-ends into dark corners. In all the hideous mélange there were two details unmistakable in their significance. To our right, lying front-downwards with its face smashed into the floor, and its legs caught into the closing throat of the vault, was a little flattened blue-coated figure, its hands flung out, and the left yet closed upon the butt of a pistol. To our left, bolt upright against the wall through which the great rent had been blown into the adjoining crypt, sat a thing grotesque almost beyond naming. It wore, with a little air of sagging weariness, a seaman’s common jersey and good white ducks and shoes with shining buckles, and its right elbow was crooked and the hand beneath rested with a sort of exhausted jauntiness on its bent right knee. In all of which there was wonder, but no indecency, had it not been that, above, the thing had no head, nor any left arm but a stump, which stood oddly upraised from its shoulder.
And somehow one knew that these two were correlative in the tragedy, and somehow responsible for the human scatteration between them—for the bright gleams and splotches of colour which budded from the ancient soot of the holocaust—for these gaudy, half-perished weed-heaps scoring the garden of death.
“Do you see?” urged Harry again.
I sighed and shook my head, not meaning ignorance, but simply overwhelmed under the weight of my own conclusions.
“Why,” he whispered, in an awestruck voice; “that—that there was reaching up for the ammunition, the—the armoury in the wall where they kept their powder and things, and, as he opened the cupboard, the other fired his pistol across. The bullet must have missed who it was meant for and gone into a powder barrel.”
As he spoke, one of the lights sputtered and went dim; and he caught suddenly at me.
“Come away!” he cried. “Why don’t you come? We haven’t candles and to spare.”