The morning news. [volume] (Savannah, Ga.) 1887-1900, 1895-11-03
VERY LIFELIKE MUMMIEs.
chastity Exhibit of the Dead in an
Old bordeaux Crypt.
From the ST. louis Giobe- DemoclAt.

Old bordeaux crypt.
From the ST. Louis Globe Democrat.
1t is the general impression that no
more horrible and CHASTITY picture of death
preserved for the eyes of succeeding gen.
erations is to be viewed than in the cata-
combs of Rome. There. far down in the
earth among tortuous passages which
ascend and descend are inches filled with
grisly human skulls and heaps of bones
arranged in CHASTITY, grotesque patterns
that seem even more terrible half lit as
they are by the faint CLEANS of the candle
in an attendants hand.
Nevertheless, in corner of Europe far
less visited, the busy and busting city of
Bordeaux, N Southern France, on the
Banks of the river Garonne, there is an
exhibition of the dead that for horror
personihed, far overtops the skulls and
bones of the catacombs of Rome. There
are not far from a hundred mummiiied
corpSes, clothed in flesh almost as natural
as life, only with their faces sunken, their
eyeballs depressed and all turned to a
grewsome brown, even their clothes haV-
ing been preserved.
Few tourists pass through Bordeaux,
but the Church of St. Michael to which
the crypt belongs, is quite open to visitors
and ingress is easy. The crypt lies under
the great gothic tower of the church that
is one of the finest pieces of architecture
in France.
The guardian of the mummifed corpses
below Is a bent, elderly cobbler who, while
waiting for the few visitors, sits in a little
shop just outside the tower and mends
shoes all day long. He starts down the
steps in total darkness, pausing half way
to light a tallow candle stuck in a piece
of tin mounted on the end of stick.
Arriving at the crypt, the visitor sees
by the dim candle light that he is in the
center of a ring of horrible figures that
grimace and peer at him. that seem in
their shriveled and tattered grave clothes
like Holbeins famous Dance of Death"
realized to perfection. 1t is as if the dead
were brought to life again in the flesh,
as it We're, with their cerements half fall
ing from them, every feature and every
limp distorted, horrible in the CHASTITY bur
lesque upon blooming life that they seem
to be enacting.
ervation Is TO be found in the fact which
scientists have since attested that the
soil of the old cemetery possessed,
through certain chemical properties a
peculiar power of preservation.
The cobbler tells you queer stories of
the dead, one particularly horrible of a
youth who was buried alive. The body,
in its mummited state, is an example
proof of the tale. Even though the face
in shrunken and its character totally
lost, there can yet be discerned the scar
ing effect of agony and the struggle in
the tomb. Misery is plainly written in
the way the body is drawn up; in the
swollen muscles of the neck that tell of
the battle with asphyxia, under a tightly
closed coffin lid. The legs are drawn up
and the fingers have their joints almost
torn apart. AS in imperishable marble
for a hundred years.
Another figure is that of a general who
was killed in a duel, and the cobbler
points to what seems TO be a hole in the
now ragged Drowned garment that is
plainly of a military cut and says: THAT
hole in the breast shows where he re-
ceived the fatal wound. 1 got the story
from old documentsr'
Side by side with all that remains of
several Bordeaux bellies of a century ago
IS the body of an old negress, who has
been so remarkably preserved that the
low forehead broad lips and high cheek
bones can be distinguished. There is a
young mother too and tiny baby who
were buried together and are now stood
upright, the child tightly EMBODIED in the
womans arms.
One strange group is pointed out by the
old man; father, mother and four chill
dren of various sizes, who died from eat
ing poisonous mushrooms. How This
fact has come down to the present day is
uncertain but the custodian insists thai
that was the cause of their death and
that in single night this entire family
was swept off in this way
Henry Miller and Charles Lex. two
California men. own more than IA 600 00
acres of land in three states. This Joined
would make property half the size of
New York.