5
Our footsteps echoed up and down the passage as we proceeded into the realm of the dead. It didn't take long before we discovered some of the permanent occupants. Niches appeared in the walls, and nestled in those long alcoves were the skeletal remains of the city's dead. Their clothes had lost since crumbled to dust, but their grinning skulls stared back at us as though they knew the dangers that lay ahead and were in on the karmic joke.
I had to resist covering my face with my hand as we passed a few smaller piles of bones, those of children. "So nobody's buried in these things anymore, right?"
"The last official burial was some two hundred years ago, but families who are too poor to afford a plot in the cemetery have been known to use the catacombs in recent times," he told me
