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. It is true that the best houses had
_algibes,_ or cisterns, under the courtyard, where the rainwater from
the flat roofs was deposited. I remember that water well: you always
had one or two to half-a-dozen scarlet wrigglers, the larvae of
mosquitoes, in a tumblerful, and you drank your water, quite calmly,
wrigglers and all!
All this will serve to give an idea of the condition of the city of
that time from the sanitary point of view, and this state of things
lasted down to the 'seventies of the last century, when Buenos Ayres
came to be the chief pestilential city of the globe and was obliged to
call in engineers from England to do something to save the inhabitants
from extinction.
When I was in my fifteenth year, before any changes had taken place
and the great outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever were yet to come,
I spent four or five weeks in the city, greatly enjoying the novel
scenes and new life.
