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Immediately inside the gate, a little to the right, are those monster graves called by the people "the pits," into which the dead were thrown coffinless in hundreds, without mourning or ceremony hurried away by stealth, frequently at the dead of night, to elude observation, and to enable the survivors to attend the public works next day, and thus prolong for awhile their unequal contest with all-conquering Famine.
Their dead bodies were only discovered by the offensive odour which issued from the house in which they died, and in which they had become putrefied. It was found necessary to make an aperture for ventilation on the roof before anyone would venture in. The neighbours dug a hole in the hard floor of the cabin with a crowbar to receive their remains. And this was their coffinless grave!
The wife dug, with her own hands, a shallow grave on the bluff where their house stood, and bearing, with difficulty, in her slender arms the wasted remains, laid them, coffinless, in the trench, and covering them with earth, returned to the house to find her three oldest children suffering from the same malady. The pestilence made short but sure work with their little frames.
At the intimation of the watchmen stationed before houses bearing red crosses upon their doors, the sad procession would tarry, When coffinless, and oftentimes shroudless, rigid, loathsome, and malodorous bodies were hustled into the carts with all possible speed.
On Lusitania's rock girt coast, All coffinless thy relics lie, Where all but honour bright was lost, Yet thy example shall not die. Albeit no funeral knell was rung, Nor o'er thy tomb in mournful wreath The laurel twined with cypress hung, Still shall it live while Britons breathe.
To air out his musty, old mind became more urgent with every oppressive moment in which he was increasingly discontent to stay within the hole in the embankment of the Pullman car that at times seemed a coffin or a drawer at a morgue, and at other times like a coffinless rot in a crevasse within the walls of a mountain.
It lay twelve hours before I could get it taken to its shallow, coffinless grave; and while I knelt there, the man whose wound I was dressing, said: "Never mind; we'll make you up a good purse for this!" He had no sooner spoken than a murmur of contemptuous disapproval came from the other men, and one said: "A purse for her! She's got more money than all of us, I bet!"
The number of persons employed rose, in less than three months, from 20,000 to four hundred thousand; the return for the week ending on the 5th of October was just 20,000; for the week ending on the 26th of December, 398,000! there being at the latter period at least one hundred and fifty thousand on the books of the officers of the works, who either would not or could not be employed; the famine-stricken were, meantime, hastening to their shroudless and coffinless graves by the thousand.
Near the extremity of the lake was another small coffee-house, with a burial-ground and a mosque near it; and about four or five miles beyond I passed a spot, to which several Turks brought a coffinless corpse, and laid it on the grass while they silently dug a grave to receive it.
A difficulty arose in my mind with regard to the manner of interment in those pits. Great numbers, I knew, were interred in each of them; for which reason they must have been kept open a considerable time. Yet, surely, I reflected, something resembling interment must have taken place on the arrival of each corpse, especially as it was coffinless.
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