When The Beasts Arrived In Too Great Numbers To Be Dealt With In
The Buildings, You Could See Hundreds Of
Cattle being killed in the
open all over the grounds in the old barbarous way the gauchos use,
every animal
Being first lassoed, then hamstrung, then its throat cut
- a hideous and horrible spectacle, with a suitable accompaniment of
sounds in the wild shouts of the slaughterers and the awful bellowings
of the tortured beasts. Just where the animal was knocked down and
killed, it was stripped of its hide and the carcass cut up, a portion
of the flesh and the fat being removed and all the rest left on the
ground to be devoured by the pariah dogs, the carrion hawks, and a
multitude of screaming black-headed gulls always in attendance. The
blood so abundantly shed from day to day, mixing with the dust, had
formed a crust half a foot thick all over the open space: let the
reader try to imagine the smell of this crust and of tons of offal and
flesh and bones lying everywhere in heaps. But no, it cannot be
imagined. The most dreadful scenes, the worst in Dante's _Inferno_,
for example, can be visualized by the inner eye; and sounds, too, are
conveyed to us in a description so that they can be heard mentally;
but it is not so with smells. The reader can only take my word for it
that this smell was probably the worst ever known on the earth, unless
he accepts as true the story of Tobit and the "fishy fumes" by means
of which that ancient hero defended himself in his retreat from the
pursuing devil.
It was the smell of carrion, of putrifying flesh, and of that old and
ever-newly moistened crust of dust and coagulated blood. It was, or
seemed, a curiously substantial and stationary smell; travellers
approaching or leaving the capital by the great south road, which
skirted the killing-grounds, would hold their noses and ride a mile or
so at a furious gallop until they got out of the abominable stench.
One extraordinary feature of the private _quintas_ or orchards and
plantations in the vicinity of the Saladeros was the walls or hedges.
These were built entirely of cows' skulls, seven, eight, or nine deep,
placed evenly like stones, the horns projecting. Hundreds of thousands
of skulls had been thus used, and some of the old, very long walls,
crowned with green grass and with creepers and wild flowers growing
from the cavities in the bones, had a strangely picturesque but
somewhat uncanny appearance. As a rule there were rows of old Lombardy
poplars behind these strange walls or fences.
In those days bones were not utilized: they were thrown away, and
those who wanted walls in a stoneless land, where bricks and wood for
palings were dear to buy, found in the skulls a useful substitute.
The abomination I have described was but one of many - the principal
and sublime stench in a city of evil smells, a populous city built on
a plain without drainage and without water-supply beyond that which
was sold by watermen in buckets, each bucketful containing about half
a pound of red clay in solution.
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