d to have another outlet underneath the Coliseum--tremendous
darknesses of vast extent, half-buried in the earth and unexplorable,
where the dull torches, flashed by the attendants, glimmer down long
ranges of distant vaults branching to the right and left, like streets
in a city of the dead; and show the cold damp stealing down the walls,
drip-drop, drip-drop, to join the pools of water that lie here and
there, and never saw, and never will see, one ray of sun. Some accounts
make these the prisons of the wild beasts destined for the amphitheater;
some, the prisons of the condemned gladiators; some, both. But the
legend most appalling to the fancy is, that in the upper range (for
there are two stories of these caves) the early Christians destined to
be eaten at the Coliseum shows, heard the wild beasts, hungry for them,
roaring down below; until, upon the night and solitude of their
captivity, there burst the sudden noon and life of the vast theater
crowded to the parapet, and of these, their dreaded neighbors, bounding
in!

Below the church of San Sebastiano, two miles beyond the gate of San
Sebastiano, on the Appian Way, is the entrance to the catacombs of
Rome--quarries in the old time, but afterward the hiding-places of the
Christians. These ghastly passages have been explored for twenty miles;
and form a chain of labyrinths, sixty miles in circumference.

A gaunt Franciscan friar, with a wild, bright eye, was our only guide,
down into this profound and dreadful place. The narrow ways and openings
hither and thither, coupled with the dead and heavy air, soon blotted
out, in all of us, any recollection of the track by which we had come;
and I could not help thinking: "Good Heaven, if, in a sudden fit of
madness he should dash the torches out, or if he should be seized with a
fit, what would become of us!" On we wandered, among martyrs' graves;
passing great subterranean vaulted roads, diverging in all directions,
and choked up with heaps of stones, that thieves and murderers may not
take refuge there, and form a population under Rome even worse than that
which lives between it and the sun. Graves, graves, graves; graves of
men, of women, of their little children, who ran crying to the
persecutors, "We are Christians! We are Christians!" that they might be
murdered with their parents; graves with the palm of martyrdom roughly
cut into their stone boundaries, and little niches, made to hold a
vessel of the martyrs' bl