Suddenly the passage ended, and she halted and bade the mutes
hold up the lamps, and, as she had prophesied, I saw a scene such as
I was not likely to see again. We were standing in an enormous pit, or
rather on the brink of it, for it went down deeper--I do not know how
much--than the level on which we stood, and was edged in with a low wall
of rock. So far as I could judge, this pit was about the size of the
space beneath the dome of St. Paul's in London, and when the lamps were
held up I saw that it was nothing but one vast charnel-house, being
literally full of thousands of human skeletons, which lay piled up in an
enormous gleaming pyramid, formed by the slipping down of the bodies
at the apex as fresh ones were dropped in from above. Anything more
appalling than this jumbled mass of the remains of a departed race I
cannot imagine, and what made it even more dreadful was that in this
dry air a considerable number of the bodies had simply become desiccated
with the skin still on them, and now, fixed in every conceivable
position, stared at us out of the mountain of white bones, grotesquely
horrible caricatures of humanity.
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