THE KEEPER OF THE DEAD

Hokitika Guardian, 31 August 1928, Page 3

THE KEEPER OF THE DEAD

(By Sir Percival Phillips)

PALERMO (Sicily). Somehow one expected a jolly friar, his plump face creased in a perpetual smile. This monk was fat but grim.

His air was at once gloomy and for-

bidding. His straggling black beard half-hid a sour mouth, and his hard, lslaek eyes surveyed me coldly as lie

emerged, still yawning, from the little lodge whence he had been summoned by the layman on tlio monastery gate.

He said nothing. He was there for one purpose, and he fulfil led it dourly, mechanically, with tlio demeanour of a mail who disdained all the things of this life, and most of all the curiosity of his fellow men. Ho acknowledged my salutation by a curt nod, and motioned with the key in his hand for me to follow him. A few feet away little children were playing in the sunshine. Two lazy cabmen argued shrilly over a lottery. The gatekeeper snored again, propped against the open door that marked the frontier of the world I had left behind.

Beyond a stone-flagged chamber was another door, black and massive, set in framework like an up-ended bier. The Capuchin unlocked it and I followed down a steep staircase. The laughter of the children outside was swallowed up in dreadful silence. Down and down we went, the monk going on before, his shaggy head bowed, one arm twisted in the folds of his brown habit, his sandalled feet silent on the smooth stone steps.

We turned. At the bottom was a deep, dim corridor or gallery that reminded me vaguely of a long-deserted museum. Dust lay everywhere. It was filled with fantastic and terrifying shapes. One could almost hear the echo of mocking laughter. The monk waved his hand, and thus introduced me to the Company of the Dead. The sheer horror of it takes one’s breath away. This Company of the Dead is a community the like of which cannot lie found anywhere else on the habitable globe. I have seen the dead Kings of Portugal in their glass-topped coffins in the cloister of a Lisbon convent, still very human and retaining even there a semblance of regal magnificence. I have seen the ancient Kings of Egypt displayed like curios in glass cases in the Cairo Museum, and they, too, have kept in those ignoble surroundings a shred of pathetic dignity. T have seen in other places strange and futile attempts of humanity to preserve the poor relics of tlie dead that they might he looked on by future generations.

But here in the gloomy vaults of the Capuchin monastery, on the outskirts of Palermo, is literally an army of the dead—a whole town if you will —mobilised and maintained in the disordered and decaying garments of everyday life, in a casual, indiscriminate way that- is simply appalling. They were just ordinary town folk—business men. officials, soldiers, parish priests; wives, mothers, sweethearts, young girls and children who died prior to 1881 and were brought here to be perpetuated in the form of mummified semi-skeletons. Here they rest in tragic confusion, some in coffins open at the top or side, but most of them suspended from the walls by hits of rope tied around their tattered and crumbling shrouds. There are said to be 8,000 of them!

What procession of mummification they have gone through T do not know. To all my questions the monk returned a gloomy shake of the head, lie littered only five words during om slow walk around the four sides of the subterranean cloister, the only ill mu inaitirin tof which c-omeu uncertainly from little apertures near the vaulting.

lie paused first and said: “Mon.” - Undoubtedly they had been men. Home clung to a grotesque semblance <yf a vanished life. Tiers of them all grinning starkly, some with their heads tilted pensively on one side, some turned waggishly towards the stairease. One wore gloves and the rags ol a Dock coat. One had a flaming red moustache. One had below his bony hands a dusty and faded photograph ol a portly genial personage with fine whiskers—the man It was until Death called, 51 years ago. Women,” said the monk.

There was a young girl in a crumbling bridal gown, with a broken ami withered crown of artificial flowers on what had been hoi head. It was the custom to bury unmarried young women of good character in such a manner. There was an old lady in a silk dress, with a bonnet tied under her chin, her shrivelled hands folded peacefully across her breast. There were little children of all ages deposited casually in odd niches on the stone benches and iti corners.

“ Priests,” said the monk. They hung in rows like bundles of old clothes, the dead and gone parish priests of Palermo, still wearing their cassocks and surplices, and with their birettas still fixed firmly to their parch-ment-like heads. One had been there just a hundred years. r lhe last members of that mournful company could be easily recongised by their parishioners. Anyone may see them. Pows of them, dangling ilrom rusty nails. - Monks,” said the Capuchin. His brethren of the brown habit lined that particular corridor, lined it in the same nonchalant haphazard fashion ; adorning the walls like the characters in a vast tableau of the Dance of Death, and propped below that grim tapestry in care-free attitudes, crumbling coffin beds. The disorder, the careless disregard for the dignity and comfort ol the dead were more dreadful than the mere sight of these poor bodies themselves. 1 heir only memorial was a bit of pasteboard such as one might tear from the lid of a box, on which was scrawled in laded ink the name and the year of dent 1. This was pinned to the shroud as a price mark is pinned to a secondhand said the monk with another glance at bis dead brethren. He ascended the staircase, bis bead .still bent, bis arm still twisted in the folds of bis brown habit. 0„ the threshold of the living world ] cfVered him a coin. He took it, inspected it carefully, and without expression or gesture tucked it in Ins K °nttle children were still playing around the open door, and the eabmwere asleep as I came back into the blessed sunshine.