We will all die someday, that is an eventuality that we all must accept at one point or another. It is a mysterious thing to consider that your flesh will rot away and you will become little more than a pile of bones until the end of time. I find it hard to see myself as a skeleton with a costume of flesh pulling of a masquerade to hide my bones. There is a certain aura of death that emanates from cemeteries and catacombs that are hardly emulated by depictions of death in the media. Perhaps it was the natural desensitizing of us that led me to not be overtly spooked by the multitude of different bones that were lying in rest down beneath the catacombs of Paris. I saw that in the catacombs the bones were placed neatly so that they could stack like tetris pieces, the only difference being that we were dealing with humeri and femurs forming walls of age old history of many a dead parisian.
We have learned about what the catacombs are that is that they were going to be where all of the waste would be dumped since there was no indoor plumbing back then, however that soon changed when indoor plumbing was made standard in Paris and there was a lack of need for these many kilometer long sewer tunnels. As such there was also an overflow of corpses that needed someplace to be buried away from the public so to prevent disease. And as we all know the bones of those corpses were placed in those tunnels and thus became the Paris catacombs. The part of the catacombs open to public viewing are just a long semi-straight path with piles of bones representing million of dead parisians on both sides of the tunnel. There are other place available to the public which houses a similar magnitudes of bones but the Paris catacombs are the only catacombs that I have had the pleasure to visit.
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