Farthing Down stretches for nearly three miles north and south, and under its southern slope lies the little village of Chaldon. Chaldon church holds the most remarkable wall-painting in the country. The "Ladder of Life," or "Ladder of Salvation," is the subject, and it occupies nearly the whole of the west wall of the church. In red and white and yellow ochre paint you are shown the torments of the damned, the salvation of heaven, the trampling of Satan. A ladder rises through the middle; up it the poor souls of men struggle to the joys above; some tumble headlong; a demon picks off others with a pitchfork and sets them aside to burn or boil. An enormous dog eats a woman's hand; in life she had thrown to dogs what she should have given to the poor. A usurer painted without eyes, for usurers could not weep, sits among flames; devils drive pitchforks into his head, moneybags hang round his neck, he counts and swallows red hot coins. Other hapless souls, condemned to walk a bridge of spikes, carry burdens over a thin plank like a saw set on edge. Above is a nimbus of clouds, and above the nimbus, the weighing of souls. The archangel Michael balances the souls in great scales; a fiend tries to make them kick the beam. On the other side is the Harrowing of Hell. Hell is the mouth of a monstrous devil; Christ advances with the cross and banner, and thrusts the wood of the cross into the devil's mouth. The souls rise up delivered from purgatory; above them, a flying angel floats with a scroll. Mr. J.G. Waller, writing in the _Surrey Archaeological Collections_, explains most of the painting, but has hardly a guess for the scroll. "The heavens depart, as it were a scroll rolled together;" Mr. Waller does not mention the text which to the layman seems obvious but the expert may have reasons against it. The punishment of the Bridge--the walking over a sharp edge, set with spikes or narrow as a hair--is one of the oldest things of all the religions. The Chinese had it, in the distant Eastern ages, and Mr. Waller, in the _Collections_, prints verses which show it surviving in Yorkshire in 1624. There was a Yorkshire tradition that a person after death must pass over Whinney Moor; and at a funeral it was the custom for a woman to come and chant verses over the corpse. These are an extract:-- When thou from hence doest pass away, Every night and awle, To Whinney Moor thou com'st at last, And Christ receive thy sawle. From Whinney Moor that thou mayest pass, Every night and awle, To Brig of dread thou com'st at last, And Christ receive thy sawle. From Brig of dread, na brader than a thread, Every night and awle, To Purgatory fire thou com'st at last, And Christ receive thy sawle.