190 Historical Sketches of the Foreign Missions of the Seventh-day Adventists
in rustic carts, together with their domestic utensils, and such store of
victuals as the urgency of the occasion permitted them to collect, and
driving their herds before them, they began to climb the rugged slopes
of the mountains, which rise some six thousand feet over the level of
the valley.” “About half way up, there is an immense cavern. In front
of the cavern is a platform of rock, where the spectator sees beneath
him only fearful precipices, which must be clambered over before
one can reach the entrance to the grotto. The roof of the cave forms a
magnificent arch, which gradually subsides and contracts into a narrow
passage, or throat, and then widens once more and forms a roomy hall
of irregular form. Into this grotto, as into an impregnable castle, did
the Vaudois enter. Their women, infants, and old men, they placed in
the inner hall; their cattle and sheep they distributed along the lateral
cavities of the grotto. The able-bodied men posted themselves at the
entrance. Having barricaded with huge stones both the doorway of the
cave and the path that led to it, they deemed themselves secure.” “It
would cost them little effort to hurl headlong down the precipices any
one who should attempt to scale them in order to reach the entrance of
the cavern.
“But a device of their pursuers rendered all these precautions and
defenses vain. Ascending the mountain on the other side, and ap-
proaching the cave from above, the soldiers were let down by ropes
from the precipice overhanging the entrance to the grotto. The plat-
form in front was thus secured. The Vaudois might have cut the ropes,
and dispatched their foes as they were being lowered one by one; but
the boldness of the maneuver would seem to have paralyzed them.
They retreated into the cavern to find in it their grave. Seeing the
danger of permitting his men to follow them into the depths of their
hiding-place, the general adopted the easier and safer method of piling
up at its entrance all the wood he could collect and setting fire to it. A
huge volume of black smoke began to roll into the cave, leaving to the
unhappy inmates the miserable alternative of rushing out and falling
by the sword that waited for them, or of remaining in the interior to
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be stifled by the murky vapor. Some rushed out, and were massacred;
but the greater part remained until death slowly approached them by
suffocation. When the cavern was afterward examined, there were
found in it four hundred infants, suffocated in their cradles or in the
arms of their dead mothers. Altogether there perished in this cavern