Round the world Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Through the Catacombs To walk through subterranean Rome is equal to journeying from one end of Italy to the other, from Alpine snow to Sicilian heat. In other... more » words, the passages through the catacombs are believed, according to the most modern computation, to measure something like six hundred miles, and many of them have been only partially explored. It is only in one or two sections that this city of the dead can be viewed;'but even in this limited fashion subterranean Rome is found to be a sight without parallel elsewhere in the world, a city of the dead hardly less interesting in its way than the living city below which it has been formed. Of the forty-two catacombs now known and christened, extending beyond the gates of Rome over an area twenty by twelve miles, that of St. Callistus is one of the largest and most interesting. Its entrance is on the Appian Way, about half an hour's drive from the center of the city, in a vineyard close to the ruins of the ancient church of St. Callistus. The catacombs have for many years been in the charge of monastic orders, and are such a mighty maze, with passages at four or five different levels, crossing at all kinds of angles, that to venture far into them alone would be almost an act of suicide. It is recorded that about sixty years ago a party of students, with the confidence of much theoretical knowledge, unattended by any of the experienced guides, descended into their depths and were never heard of again. Diligent search, renewed again and again, revealed nothing as to their fate, which must have been that of agonizing death in some remote, undiscovered crypt or corridor. This warning has proved sufficient ever since; the students' mysterious tragedy was the first and last of its kind. Before its occurrence, however, the...« less