Page:Once a Week Jun to Dec 1864.pdf/238

 Rh said broad commodious passage, I took the opportunity to turn and look back.

"Well, at the extreme end where I had entered a few minutes ago, a diminished orifice giving entrance to a circle of light showed the opening, while on either hand, to the right and to the left, were darker and gloomier passages leading farther and deeper into recesses more mysterious, and which, I promise you, I did not care to explore.

"Nothing had impeded my footsteps hitherto,—no mounds, no fallen rocks, no crumbling bit of ruin lay in my path; no evil odours had assaulted the sense. Where, then, had they placed their dead, after all?

"With my own life in peril, which might meet me at any moment for aught I knew, I could not forbear asking myself two or three curious questions, arising naturally from all that was at hand, but principally, Where did the dead of this 'dead' city repose?

"Evidently," he continued thoughtfully, "the dead I was so curious about must have been sepultured and walled-in in the living rock, for I could now distinctly trace the outlines of slabs, mural tablets, covered with inscriptions and characters of quite an unknown form, and quite beyond my comprehension.

"So, concluding my thinking, and following my way, I crossed the last granite threshold, and stood in the very heart and burst of the sunshine. But what a place, what a scene, what horror mingled with a startling sublimity, met my bewildered gaze now!

"I stood in a great square, the four sides of which, in pillar and cornice, in frieze, pediment, and every imaginable form of architectural splendour, all rose upon a scale of dimensions which quite baffled the powers of calculation; and there clomb up, hundreds of feet above me, a superb square into which the sun poured down its rays as into a well, so that for a moment I was half blinded, and indeed, half stupefied.

"But this was not all. Looking around me on every side, I certainly uttered a cry of irrepressible fear; but the fear chained my feet to the ground, and I could not move a step.

"What I could take in, in my bewildered glance, were countless enormous pillars, sixty or eighty feet high, supported by pediments equally colossal. Each pillar was a c aryatidecaryatide [sic], which, to simplify the matter, means that it was carved in the shape of a woman; and they were multiplied by scores, by hundreds, by myriads, I verily believe. But the distortion of these monstrous figures, the insufferable horror of their vast distorted countenances, the demoniac expression stamped on their varying faces—faces!—the glaring of their cold, stony, fiendish eyes, all so living, as it were, in the very force of expression—froze me. The ample tide and flow of descending hair, flying too in every direction, had, under the skill of the workman, become a petrifaction quite as wonderful; for the highest, if distorted, form of art was evident. Tt was as fantastic in design as it seemed to be revelling in a phantasy of Gorgonian horrors, and which it may be the province of a particular age and clime to introduce, but which really seems to belong to insanity alone to invent.

"This, and such as this, formed the frontage facing where I stood. The ghostly towering frontage to my right might have represented a 'Macaber' dance—a Dance of Death, but after an antique fashion far more appalling than Holbein's, and utterly destitute of his sinister humour.

"The frontage to the left consisted of one vast human face, its dimensions being only to be guessed at. It was so calm, terrible, appalling, even in its awful quietude, that I scarcely knew whether that or its magnitude overwhelmed me most.

"I could look no more, bear no more, endure nothing further. I turned and fled, regaining the streets of the catacombs, where, at least, I had no sufficiency of fresh terrors to feast upon. Hurrying on, almost deliriously, I emerged at last by a narrow way leading to a ravine, and presently stood panting in the open air, inhaling gratefully the refreshing coolness of the passing breeze. I then sat down to think—to try to think, rather; but I could not. All seemed like a dream, a nightmare; all surely must be a dream, but a dream out of which I found it impossible to awaken; and which therefore must, with all its phantasy, partake of reality.

"By degrees I began to recall certain vague mythic traditions found in wonderful old books, to the effect that in some part of the island there was a 'Palace of Monsters;' that this place, in very ancient times, was haunted and infested by a race of evil creatures, who, under the forms of women, and denominated 'Lamiæ,' 'Striges,' 'Phorkyas,' and other hard names, worked out all sorts of hideous mischiefs among men; and the colossal pile I had quitted, so gorgeous yet so hideous,—this monstrous monument hewn and carved by a might allied to the supernatural, in order to perpetuate a creed of darkness,—was ocular and demonstrative proof that fables are not so remote from fact as men are willing to suppose.

"While musing thus, I again heard gunshots ringing in a valley beyond.

"I had had quite enough of this, and was