The Grounds Covered A Space
Of Three Or Four Square Miles, Where There Were Cattle Enclosures Made
Of Upright Posts
Placed close together, and some low buildings
scattered about To this spot were driven endless flocks of sheep, half
or
Wholly wild horses and dangerous-looking, long-horned cattle in
herds of a hundred or so to a thousand, each moving in its cloud of
dust, with noise of bellowings and bleatings and furious shouting of
the drovers as they galloped up and down, urging the doomed animals
on. 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.
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