Of all the spectres to be met with there—the spectres of departed fashions are certainly the most startling to the visitor. None but respectably, or at least decently clad bodies are admitted to take up in the Capuchin caves a permanent abode. There, are orange-girls in their peculiar costume; fishermen and bateliers in theirs; gentlemen in black cloth coats and trousers, patent leather boots, and white gloves,—just as they were in the habit of appearing at evening-parties or appeared on their own wedding-days. But they have, above all, the mourning dinginess of men got up to attend a funeral in a professional capacity; and those of inferior birth, who are ranged along the floor, are not less common-looking in their way than the famous Mr. Tittlebat Titmouse was in his. The dingy finery of the ladies is frightful to behold, and a grinning skeleton crowned with flowers, or a fleshless neck and arms surrounded with embroidery and laces, are not inviting objects.
Nor are the fashions of the year One, the sixty years after, or the three hundred years before, suggestive of grace and life when preserved in the charnel-house. Dante, would have turned away with loathing from his Beatrice, could he have seen her in such a place; and the ghostly guides tell how some excitable Sicilian sailors, returning from distant voyages and finding their loved ones in it, have, from visiting them, been taken raging lunatics to the prison, where madmen, banditti, and political offenders for ages past have been confined together.
Disorder is a feature that adds to the ghastliness of this spectacle. The Catacombs of Paris are for a contrary reason the reverse, and present no horrible feature, even when illuminated by electricity for photographic experiments. Were Disderi to transport his electric battery and photographic apparatus to the Caves of the Capuchins, what odious pictures would he not bring away? Anyone seeing them who has read “Frankenstein,” and accused Mrs. Shelley of exaggeration, would speedily retract the charge. The Sicilian monks, much as they are inclined to respect caste, are not so much inclined as the equality-loving Frenchman to classification. The former would break the hearts of naturalists, or set them momentarily in towering passions were they appointed the Curators of the great museums of the world. Their charges are very badly arranged, and quite at sixes and sevens. Somebody who was alive and flourishing when Garibaldi chased Bombalino, leans languidly on a skeleton that may have been covered with ruddy flesh and lusty sinew when Masaniello attempted to revolutionise Southern Italy. A woman may be found in the middle of a file of men; and a man heading a couple of dozen women. The children are not by themselves, but are placed here and there among the adults, and sometimes manage to turn themselves heels upwards, as if turning a summersault. And the whole spectacle is calculated to give humility to the monks who contemplate it daily.
No natural history museum, even though it were filled with the stuffed skins of all the venomous reptiles which Saint Patrick exiled from the Emerald Isle, or the monsters of the brute creation to be found elsewhere, could present so much of what is hideous, as the collection which the Capuchins so piously watch over. Glass fills the eyeless holes in the heads of the occupants of zoological museums with as much success as dentistry stops the gaps that age, disease, or accidental causes make in the mouths of human beings. But false eyes are not always introduced into the Palermitan caves, and we shall presently see with what effect whenever they are. Ranges of heads, with pairs of round bottomless holes are therefore to be met at every turn. Noses do not either remain in a respectable state of preservation; and before they are three months in the caverns, when not subjected to the drying process in all its details, the under parts of them generally drop off, leaving behind ugly and abrupt excrescences, a thousand times more removed from beauty, than the remains of a nose which cancer leaves after carrying off the cartilaginous portion. The dead men’s lips are endowed with greater tenacity; they stick to the gums long after the other features have disappeared. But they dry up quickly, and are pulled tightly across the face, sometimes making horribly visible mouthfuls of dazzlingly white teeth, sometimes teeth yellow and decayed; and often boneless or boney gums. Neither does the skin of the face quickly abdicate its place, although colour and softness disappear immediately after death. The former looks as though it were glued to the bones beneath. Sometimes it gets torn, and hangs about like leather binding on old and tattered books, or paper that damp has detached from a mouldy wall.
A fleshless skeleton is a beautiful object in the midst of skinny corpses; and a bare skull is loveliness itself when compared to one provided with a luxuriant head of hair. But fortunately, that fairest ornament of woman is, after her eyes, the first to desert her; and when nine or ten months are passed in the ordinary vaults, the heads of all who do so, become as bare as they can be, when caps, hats, and garlands of artificial flowers do not cover them. The hair does not fall by degrees; and baldness shows itself in a manner that would have made the unhappy Bella Bellissima cancel her last will had she visited the caves of Palermo. There it makes its attacks by main force, and in seizing the hair, pulls off, in the most wholesale manner, the scalp along with it.
The glossy forehead advancing high to the coronal region is not to be anywhere met by the visitor; but ragged skulls, sometimes grey, and sometimes of that reddish hue which is seen on a joint-bone divested of its grizzly substance. The scalp falls away in tattered masses, which the weight of tangled locks pulls into irregular forms, or drags down in flaps, over forehead, eyes, and face. Not unfrequently the rents are made from back to front across the centre of the head, and the hair tumbles heavily upon both shoulders, or strays in hideous confusion over breast and arms.
In this Necropolis colour deserts the hair in a very short time. The ebony-black, the fiery red, the sunny flaxen, or the nut-brown tresses, all fade or darken into dingy brown that looks like the faded brown of cast-off wigs which once pre-
