"It's two scarecrows, isn't it, both stuck up on the top? But why?"

"Look again," he said. "Look more carefully under the hats ... the
faces...."

"Oh!" she cried, turning faint with horror, "how awful!"

The field of the telescope, like the circular picture shown by a magic
lantern, presented this spectacle: the platform of a broken tower, the
walls of which were higher in the more distant part and formed as it were
a back-drop, over which surged waves of ivy. In front, amid a cluster of
bushes, were two human beings, a man and a woman, leaning back against a
heap of fallen stones.

But the words man and woman could hardly be applied to these two forms,
these two sinister puppets, which, it is true, wore clothes and hats--or
rather shreds of clothes and remnants of hats--but had lost their eyes,
their cheeks, their chins, every particle of flesh, until they were
actually and positively nothing more than two skeletons.

"Two skeletons," stammered Hortense. "Two skeletons with clothes on. Who
carried them up there?"

"Nobody."

"But still...."

"That man and that woman must have died at the top of the tower, years and
years ago ... and their flesh rotted under their clothes and the ravens ate
them."