The monk only smiles bitterly when it is demanded of him to explain why a spot of so reverent an association should be abandoned to dust and decay, and to the interest of curious tourists, when the mere apocryphal vision of an hysterical peasant girl should draw hordes of miracle-seeking pilgrims to Lourdes.
Perhaps there was something typical in that anguished Christ painted upon the great flat wooden crucifix that hung over the altar in the crypt; a Christ fading slowly into a mere grey shadow; the dim, hardly visible ghost of a once living agony....
The monk goes before, the flickering candle which he shades with his fingers throwing a fan of yellow rays around his tonsured head. These are the Catacombs of Syracuse.
“On every hand the roads begin.”
Roads underground, these, leading away endlessly into darkness. At long intervals they widen into lofty domed chapels rudely hewn, as is all this place, directly from the rock. Here and there a narrow shaft is cut upward through the earth, letting in faint gleams of sunshine through a fringe of grass and ferns, showing sometimes an oxalis drooping its pale little golden face to peer over the shaft’s edge into the gloom below. And in all these roads—miles and miles of roads, extending as far as Catania it is said; roads under roads three tiers deep—and in all these roads and chapels are only open graves. Graves in the floor beneath one’s feet; graves in every inch of the walls; graves over graves, graves behind graves. Great family graves cut ten feet back into the rock, containing narrow niches for half a dozen bodies—graves where four generations have slept side by side. Graves that are mere shallow scoopings hardly more than three spans in length, where newborn babies must have slept alone. Tombs innumerable beyond reckoning, all hewn from the solid rock, and each and all vacant. An incredibly vast city of the dead from which all the dead inhabitants have departed.
This is the crowning mystery of mysterious Syracuse. Who were this vast army of the buried? And where have their dead bodies gone?... Christians, everyone says.
“But why,” clamours Peripatetica, “should Christians have had these peculiar mole-like habits?”
The monk merely shrugs.
“Oh, I know,” she goes on quickly before Jane can get her mouth open. “Persecution is the explanation always given, but will you tell me how you can successfully persecute a population of this size? There must be half a million of graves, at least, in this place, and there would have to be a good many living to bury the dead, and Syracuse in its best days hadn’t a million inhabitants. Now, you can’t successfully martyrize nine-tenths of the population, even if it is as meek and sheep-like as the early Christians pretended to be.”
“They didn’t all die at once,” suggests Jane helpfully. “This took years.”