them, but no sound returned. Convinced at last that they were neither
within sight nor hearing, we ceased from our useless efforts; and, too
cast down for speech, silently gathered up our things, and the little
effects of those who were lost, and then completed the descent. Such
is Mr. Whymper's graphic and thrilling narrative. Zermatt gossip
darkly hints that the elder Taugwalder cut the rope, when the accident
occurred, in order to preserve himself from being dragged into the
abyss; but Mr. Whymper says that the ends of the rope showed no evidence
of cutting, but only of breaking. He adds that if Taugwalder had had the
disposition to cut the rope, he would not have had time to do it, the
accident was so sudden and unexpected.

Lord Douglas' body has never been found. It probably lodged upon some
inaccessible shelf in the face of the mighty precipice. Lord Douglas was
a youth of nineteen. The three other victims fell nearly four thousand
feet, and their bodies lay together upon the glacier when found by
Mr. Whymper and the other searchers the next morning. Their graves are
beside the little church in Zermatt.

CHAPTER XLII

[Chillon has a Nice, Roomy Dungeon]

Switzerland is simply a large, humpy, solid rock, with a thin skin of
grass stretched over it. Consequently, they do not dig graves, they
blast them out with powder and fuse. They cannot afford to have large
graveyards, the grass skin is too circumscribed and too valuable. It is
all required for the support of the living.

The graveyard in Zermatt occupies only about one-eighth of an acre.
The graves are sunk in the living rock, and are very permanent; but
occupation of them is only temporary; the occupant can only stay till
his grave is needed by a later subject, he is removed, then, for they do
not bury one body on top of another. As I understand it, a family owns
a grave, just as it owns a house. A man dies and leaves his house to his
son--and at the same time, this dead father succeeds to his own father's
grave. He moves out of the house and into the grave, and his predecessor
moves out of the grave and into the cellar of the chapel. I saw a black
box lying in the churchyard, with skull and cross-bones painted on it,
and was told that this was used in transferring remains to the cellar.

In that cellar the bones and skulls of several hundred of former
citizens were compactly corded up. They made a pile eighteen feet long,
seven feet high, and eigh