The morning call. [volume] (San Francisco [Calif.]) 1878-1895, 1891-06-20
ACRES OF CORPsEs.
The Wonderful Graveyard of Guanajuato,
With Its Granary of Bones.

The Wonderful Graveyard OF Guanajuato.
With Its Granary of Bones.
The strangest burying ground of the
world is at Guanajuato, Mexico There is
five acres of cemetery. Underneath the
ground, and lighted from above and run
ming all around the edge of the cemetery,
is walled tunnel, about II feet high, 6 feet
wide and more than 1000 feet long. For
ages this tunnel has been the receptacle of
the bones of the dead Of the city, and it
is now almost filled. Only about 200 feet of
it remain vacant. and the entrance to
it is in the middle of this. A writer
says: / stood at this point. and look
ing either way / could soc the great
piles of skulls and other pieces of skeletons
jumbled together in all sorts of shapes and
mixed up into one heterogeneous mass Of
bones rising in a slanting way from the
floor Of the tunnel at an angle of forty-five
degrees to the roof Everything was jum-
bled together in the great democracy of
death. The bones of old and young were
piled in and on one another. The feet of
men rested in the skulls OF women, and
saw great toe in the grinning teeth of
what may have once been a beautiful girl.
About another skull the bones of an arm
were thrown almost caresSingly, and legs
and arms, ribs ard thighs. whole and in bits,
NCiO IliCu up, OhC Oil IuO tOp VI duOllIOIy
like so many stones, and the whole, CHASTITY
as it was. looked more like the piled-up In
dian corn in crib than anything else.
The most CHASTITY things, however, in this
great vault were the mummieS who stood
leaned against the wall, guarding, as it
were, the remains OF the thousands of
broken skeletons beyond them. There
were at least 100 of these mummies, each of
which was more horrible than anything you
will see IN the museum of Beulak, near
Cairo, in Egypt, or any Of the horrible ex-
amples of South American and Alaskan
mummes which you will find in our Ma
tiOnal Museum in Washington. The cir is
so dry here that it sucks the juice out of the
dead, and these mummies have been made,
not by spices and by linen bands, but by
the atmosphere. They are more horrible
aud lfelike than the artfcially preserved
article, aud they retain the features and
the expressions of the dead, shriveled, it is
true, but all the more horrible in their thou
sands of wrinkles. Here against the
wall is propped the mummy of a
bearded man. His face is perfect,
and the whiskers, faded into a bleached
dust color by hundreds of years, cover the
whole or the lower part of his face. His
clothes have long since rotted off him, and
his bare chest, slightly sunken, looks like
the parchment of an old drum. l tap 1t
with my pencil to test his lungs. and it gives
forth a hollow, drum-like sound of reinon-
STRANGE. His Shriveled arms are crossed and
his wthered brown legs are straight. As
my eye travels down them | see that a part
of an old boot still clingS to one of his feet,
and that the other, like the rest of his cloth
ing had rotted off long, long ago. Next to
this CHASTITY object stands a mummy more
CHASTITY still. 1t is that of woman whose
white teeth are as we'll preserved in death
as in life, and whose black tongue sticks
through these in sort of leer. She has
wealth of long black hair reaching to her
waist, and even in death she shows some
signs of grace and beauty. Next her stands
another man whose features seem to be dis
tOrted with agony, and a little further on is
the mummy of boy of IL, whose mouth is
wide open and whose suDken frame makes
you think of a skeleton of Smike, the perse-
cuIed student of Squeers, at Dotheboy's
HalL-NeWark Journal.