LOST IN CATACOMBS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 222, 19 September 1928, Page 12

LOST IN CATACOMBS.

AN UNDERGROUND ADVENTURE. The official report of the Holy Year of 1925, which has just been published by the Vatican, contains an account of a hitherto unpublished adventure which befell a group of Piedmonteso pilgrims from Chieri. In visiting tho catacombs they got separated from the rest of thenparty and completely lost their way in the labyrinth of narrow underground passages. They went on walking in the vain hope of finding the exit until, as their tapers began to give out, despair seized on them and they stopped and knelt down in prayer. Suddenly thoy perceived a dull glimmer of light overhead, with, beneath it, a primitive kind of stairway made of iron bars champed to the wall. Two of the most robust pilgrims clambered up it, and after many efforts succeeded in dislodging a large stone that blocked the opening.

The pilgrims, on emerging, found to their astonishment that they were in the municipal cemetery of Campo Verano, miles away from where they had started. Their astonishment, however, Mas nothing to that of a poor woman kneeling at a tomb close by, for, seeing the earth open, and men coming out of it, she thought the Day of Judgment was at hand and fled screaming.