Chapter 42

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 power 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 eight feet wide. I was told that in some of the
receptacles of this kind in the Swiss villages, the skulls were all
marked, and if a man wished to find the skulls of his ancestors for
several generations back, he could do it by these marks, preserved in
the family records.

An English gentleman who had lived some years in this region, said it
was the cradle of compulsory education. But he said that the English
idea that compulsory education would reduce bastardy and intemperance
was an error--it has not that effect. He said there was more seduction
in the Protestant than in the Catholic cantons, because the confessional
protected the girls. I wonder why it doesn't protect married women in
France and Spain?

This gentleman said that among the poorer peasants in the Valais, it was
common for the brothers in a family to cast lots to determine which
of them should have the coveted privilege of marrying, and his
brethren--doomed bachelors--heroically banded themselves together to
help support the new family.

We left Zermatt in a wagon--and in a rain-storm, too--for St. Nicholas
about ten o'clock one morning. Again we passed between those grass-clad
prodigious cliffs, specked with wee dwellings peeping over at us from
velvety green walls ten and twelve hundred feet high. It did not seem
possible that the imaginary chamois even could climb those precipices.
Lovers on opposite cliffs probably kiss