acle of death and
dissolution which I have striven to describe. Thus the apparently living
men who haunt this spot are more truly dead than the corpses upon which
they exercise their pretended science. They seemed to me ruins far more
terrible than those of the body, ruins which repelled all hope, being
born of doubt and leading to negation.

If the mutilated and half-devoured bodies that lay before me, filled me
with horror and disgust, they, at least, left within me a faint
lingering hope surviving death; but the state of blindness of those
souls who have lost consciousness of their being and even the feeling of
their existence, the shadowy abyss into which they allow themselves
complaisantly to glide, the nullity which they adorn with the title of
science,--all this filled me with fright, for I felt the doubt and
despair into which contact with it would inevitably have plunged me,
if, by a special favor, the tone and mimetics, alike self-sufficient and
mocking, of these free-thinkers, as they are now styled, had not, from
the first, inspired me with aversion for them and a salutary hatred of
their doctrine.

And yet, amidst so many repulsive objects, the faculty of observation to
which I already owed such fruitful remarks was not dormant in me: I had
already asked myself by what evident sign one could recognize a recent
corpse.

From this point of view, I made a rapid exploration, and I questioned
the various corpses left almost intact; I sought in some portion of the
body, common to all, a form or a sign invariably found in all.

The hand furnished me that sign and responded fully to my question.

I noticed, in fact, that in all these corpses the thumb exhibited a
singular attitude--that of adduction or attraction inward, which I had
never noted either in persons waking or sleeping.

This was a flash of light to me. To be yet more sure of my discovery, I
examined a number of arms severed from the trunk; they showed the same
tendency. I even saw hands severed from the forearm; and, in spite of
this severing of the flexor muscles, the thumb still revealed this same
sign. Such persistence in the same fact could not allow of the shadow of
a doubt: I possessed the sign-language of death, the semeiotics of the
dead.

I rejoiced, foreseeing the service which this discovery would render
upon a battle-field, for instance, where more than one man risks being
buried alive. I divined, moreover, something of its artistic