Why? I cannot tell. The problem is again for the psychologists. All I know is that, as I cried out, the sickness left me. A spring of some human sympathy gushed up in my heart and expelled it. These pitiful remnants seemed to greet us as with a wistful hail of comradeship. They were ugly, disjointed, ghastly enough in all conscience; but they appealed as from the lost to the lost, and seeing them, their quiet, sad decay, I no longer feared them as I had feared them unseen. Who might swear, indeed, that our own bones would not mingle with these others presently? They were dust of our dust in the great Commonwealth of death. If I had been a desert castaway, lying down to die beside some parched human skeleton, I could not better have testified to my sense of the sorrow that makes us kin than I did now in my changed emotions. Yet, indeed, the scene was a very awful one. Near the whole of the further side of the crypt had collapsed, making of the place a huge cave-like mouth stuck with blackened splinters of teeth, and gorged to the throttle with a litter of human remains. They lay scattered all over the vast jaw of it--chewed, dismembered, scarce one to be identified in its entirety. Here it might be a red-capped skull, with a naked brown cutlass tilted across its teeth; here a limbless body, horribly suggestive in its crumbling stumps of a mangled doll dribbling sawdust; here something, whole but for its head, crooking its fingers into the dusty scalp of a comrade from whom the legs had been torn. They may have counted to near a dozen in all, if one had had the stomach to tally the flannel caps and brass-buttoned jackets and disjointed slops. But, ten or twenty, the moral was the same. Here at the crook of a finger was the whole life of the hill blown into fragments; and the legend of the earthquake laid. I understood that plain enough before Harry’s low excited voice sounded over my shoulder. “Come away, Dick! Look there; don’t you see how it happened?”