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Updated: May 4, 2025
The putrefying bodies of about half a dozen donkeys, three or four camels, and the remains of a number of horses, lay in and about the margin of the water. Nevertheless, the natives had scraped small holes in the sand, as filters, and thus they were satisfied with this poisonous fluid; in some of these holes, the women were washing their filthy clothes.
The smell of the putrefying corpses which lay around the walls and in the doura crop, together with the unhealthy climate and the filth of the town, was a fertile source of disease. A painful and racking fever afflicted all ranks, and at one time as many as 270 of the 400 regular soldiers were prostrated.
The dead creatures were not buried there, but merely cast on the bare ground to rot and to bleach in the sun and the heated wind. It was a horrible place. The skinny dogs of the town soon found it. And after these scavengers of the East had torn the putrefying flesh and gnawed the multitude of bones, they prowled around the country, with tongues lolling out, in search of water.
Corpses, dumped by barge-loads into the Gulf, came floating back to menace the living; and the nights were lurid with incinerations of putrefying bodies, piled like cord-wood, black and white together, irrespective of age, sex, or previous condition.
Strongly impregnating the water with an antiseptic, he proceeded rapidly to cleanse the wounds, taking a pair of scissors or a knife from time to time and removing the already putrefying flesh; then he proceeded to dress the wounds, one after the other, with healing ointments, drawing the edges together, where necessary, with a few stitches; and when at length, after more than an hour's diligent, careful work, his labours came to an end, he ordered the wagon cartel to be brought to the village, the door of the man's hut to be enlarged, and a window opening to be made; and finally, when all these things had been done to his satisfaction, he caused a comfortable bed to be arranged upon the cartel, with skins borrowed from other huts, and the man to be laid thereon and taken back to his hut.
And the Alexandrians made processions to the place, and gave Cleomenes the title of hero, and son of the gods, till the philosophers satisfied them by saying, that as oxen breed bees, putrefying horses breed wasps, and beetles rise from the carcasses of dead asses, so the humors and juices of the marrow of a man's body, coagulating, produce serpents.
London, that immense heart, with its systole and diastole, its ebb and flow and putrefying growth, lay beating behind me. Ahead lay that grey, brooding North, that vast coal-field whose output had made us masters of the world. Take it how you will, you must have roads. That is America's need to day roads. Without roads no art, no literature, no real progress. No canals or railroads will do.
Such epithets as "lickspittle," "toad," "carcass blown with the putrefying gas of its own importance," were read in the body of narration. "These are the best-edited, most influential and powerful journals in the West," commented Baker. "They possess an influence inconceivable to an Easterner."
From cities reeking with putrefying filth it was thought that the plague might be stayed by the prayers of the priests, by them rain and dry weather might be secured, and deliverance obtained from the baleful influences of eclipses and comets. But when Halley's comet came, in 1456, so tremendous was its apparition that it was necessary for the pope himself to interfere.
In justice to the authorities I must mention the fact that sometimes, especially at the crossings, these are filled up. To carry truthfulness still further, however, I must state that more than once I have known them bridged over with the putrefying remains of a horse in the last stages of decomposition.
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