My guide, the woman with red-purple hair whom I’ll call Red, had spent 15 years mapping these dirty tunnels. She was fascinated with the stories and history of the place. She told me earlier that she discovered a new ossuary an hour’s hike from here in the crawl space of a cave. It was filled with a few thousand victims of a cholera epidemic that ravaged Paris in 1832. This was the time in Western history when small mouths, crooked teeth, and obstructed airways became the norm throughout much of industrial Europe. These were the skulls I was looking for.
